According to a new study, America now has 1.6 million people in prison.

That’s the same as 1 out of every 100 adults. The statistics are even scarier when it comes to rates of minorities, with 1 in 36 Hispanics behind bars, and a whopping 1 in 15 black adults. The US imprisons more people than any other country in the world.

Because of this, we spend about $49 billion in taxes annually on corrections. The average amount of money spent in that time to incarcerate an inmate is $23,876. By 2011, the US is expected to spend $74 billion dollars each year on the prison system.

Hopefully, this will be a wake up call to lawmakers. Their current policy of warehousing people is not effective, in terms of cost or in terms of fighting crime.

As the saying goes, all prison does is make better criminals.

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The Onion put this spoof together… but it strikes us as dangerously close to reality.

As Stalin once said, “it’s not the people who vote that count; it’s the people who count the votes.”

Remember to watch your back in November….  As Frank151 previously reported, our increasing dependence on e-voting technology and electronic vote-counters is putting American democracy in some serious jeopardy.  We have to get these Diebold guys off the job; they’re literally helping to destroy the country’s founding principles. With people like this in charge, will our votes even be counted at all anymore?  One more time: these guys promised the President a win back in 2004.  

The Onion is right.  They’re not even bothering to cover up the conspiracy anymore. 

Wikileaks.org, a whistle-blower website where users can anonymously post confidential corporate and government documents (most notable for the leak of records from US prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay) has been shut down by a California court.  

No doubt there are shady CEOs and Bush Administration officials throwing parties already. 

The story is being covered heavily in terms of the site’s shut down, but not many people are talking about the worst part of the decision.  The judge not only had Wikileaks removed entirely from its host server, Dynadot, but also ordered the company to turn over all records related to the site — including IP addresses from anyone other than Dynadot who accessed the formerly-anonymous site.

Um, isn’t that in violation of at least two Constitutional rights?  Freedom of the press?  Right to privacy?  What??

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66-yr-old R&B Singer Ron Isley — the man who brought you every classic in the Isley Brothers’ catalog — was sentenced to 37 months in prison for tax evasion yesterday.

Isley stopped paying his taxes after 1997, when he declared bankruptcy and the IRS took his yacht, cars, and other property. He appealed the sentence, arguing that his old age and poor health made him unfit for jail, and that there was no evidence the prison could provide for his needs. The three-judge panel didn’t see eye to eye with him — they even called the man a pathological liar.

You know those judges liked to “Twist and Shout” back in the day, but apparently they’d rather send an old man up the river than let him enjoy his old age comfortably “Between the Sheets”…. Makes us wanna “Shout!”

Cool bit of trivia: a young Jimi Hendrix (under the moniker Jimmy James) was studio guitarist for the Isley Brothers’ start-up label, T-Neck Records. That’s him grinding on tracks like “Testify”, “Move On Over & Let Me Dance”, plus the ill re-recording of “Who’s That Lady?”

If this becomes the case, it would be a very sad development. Click here to read about it.

Apparently major record labels are never going to smarten up.

Now they’re taking people to court just for copying legally-purchased CDs onto their own computers… because apparently paying for a recording once just isn’t enough.  Meanwhile, file-sharing busts continue to rise, including one Minnesota woman who’s been ordered to pay the Recording Industry Assoc. of America $220,000 for sharing 24 songs on her computer.

Read about both stories here, in the Washington Post. 

Meanwhile, in other copyright-infringement news, mammoth file sharing and bit torrent website The Pirate Bay recently reported an all-time traffic high.  Sounds like the RIAA’s new super-hardass enforcement tactics are really paying off.

A politician in the Dominican Republic is fighting to pass legislation to ban bikinis on TV, with fines up to $15,000 for showing a thong.

No bullshit — D.R. congressman Nestor Julio Cruz Pichardo claims that revealing swimsuits are an offense to Dominican tradition, and could harm impressionable children. What, should parents avoid the beach too?

No word on what the going price is for this guy’s head.

In the name of solidarity, Frank151 wants to share this shot of Massiel Indira Taveras Henríquez, Miss Dominican Republic 2007 — wearing a bikini. Fight the power!  And merry xmas.

(photo lifted from misscontest.blogspot.com)

Danish streetwear company Fighters + Lovers was acquitted yesterday of conspiring to sponsor terrorist organizations.

F+L sold shirts featuring logos of the Farc (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The Farc is in a 40-year conflict with Colombian state forces and right-wing paramilitary groups; and combining secular Marxist philosophy with Palestinian nationalism, the PFLP runs schools & health clinics, decries Muslim fundamentalism – and also carries out attacks, including suicide bombings, on Israeli settlements and military forces.

Company offices were raided last year after F+L pledged 5 euros ($7.30) from each sale towards financing a Farc radio station, and a PFLP graphics design shop which produces Palestinian posters. F+L based their defense on the argument that, contrary to US and EU claims, the groups aren’t actually terrorist but in fact legitimate resistance groups — a view shared by the UK, the UN and, apparently, the judge who tried the case. 

Be happiest for Fighters+Lovers’ unintentional mascot, a sausage cart vendor named Preben Mikkelsen who was arrested after putting an F+L poster on his cart in Copenhagen.

Read more @ the BBC and elsewhere…

 Around 19,500 drug convicts currently incarcerated in US prisons will find out today if they’ll be getting out earlier than expected.  The Supreme Court ruled Monday that federal judges can give lighter sentences for crack cocaine crimes than those required by federal guidelines.  Today, the US Sentencing Commission will determine whether or not to change the drug convicts’ sentences retroactively, shortening sentences handed out over the past 24 years.

In 1984, Congress established a rigid set of federal guidelines for trial judges sentencing drug offenders; most notorious of these guidelines was the sharp contrast between longer sentences given for crack and shorter sentences for powdered cocaine.  Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled any binding guidelines on federal drug sentencing to be unconstitutional.  

In an effort to (finally) correct the disparity between crack and powdered cocaine jail times, the Court began the process of dismantling federal guidelines on drug crimes with cocaine convictions specifically.  Writing for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that although Congress in the 1980s apparently imagined crack to be more dangerous than powdered coke, subsequent research has disproved that thinking.  The law, she said, should reflect that reality.

For the record, only two Supreme Court Justices voted against the reduction of crack-related sentencing: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito… so, if you’re looking to hate on, these are your guys.

If you didn’t wear your trousers low before, maybe this is a reason to start…

In Dallas, there’s a new city-wide campaign to fight sagging pants.  That’s right.  Apparently, things in Dallas are so good  the city government can take time to focus on dress codes.  An ad campaign, created in part by Deputy Mayor Dwaine Caraway and funded in part by Clear Channel, has been trying to encourage Dallas residents to stop wearing their pants so damn low.  

There’s even a single, by Dallas MC Dooney da Priest, being released as a tie-in to the campaign.  Aptly titled “Pull Your Pants Up,” the message is hard to miss:

“If you stand up straight, bet your pants fall.
Might as well walk around with your pants off.
Pull ‘em up, pull ‘em up, pull ‘em up.
Be a real man. Stand up.
Is that your underwear, man? Pull your pants up.”

Dooney warns against low riding because, he says, showing your boxers sends a message: “A lot of partners of mine, who just came out of jail, they let me know — hey, that means you’re basically easy.  You’re letting another man know you’re available. It’s just the moral decay of our community.”  

But Dooney and the Deputy Mayor aren’t the only ones with boxer issues.  The legislature actually discussed a city-wide ban on low riding pants, which communities in Louisiana and Connecticut have already enacted (seriously? Connecticut?), but Dallas officials decided the law would be too difficult to enforce.  

That, and it’s totally insane.