oppose_obama wrote:I don't care to compare rates with other judicial systems and cultures.
Then you choose to avoid the whole question and you frankly have no business participating in this discussion.
America has different crime problems then the UK or Germany.
We do, but that doesn't end the question; you need to go into the specifics and ask yourself who is in prison, not just how many.
For example, we have a much higher murder rate than the UK or Germany. And yet, even so, the number of convicted murderers is much smaller than the number of convicts and doesn't account for more than a small part of the difference.
What is a crime resulting in imprisonment? There are three necessary components to this:
1) The government has to have defined the action as an offense punishable by imprisonment.
2) Someone has to have committed the offense and been convicted in court.
3) The court has to have sentenced the offender to a prison term.
So that means that, if the U.S. has a higher incarceration rate than other countries, one or more of the following things must be true:
1) Actions are illegal and punishable by prison terms in the U.S. that are either not illegal or not punishable by prison terms in other countries.
2) People are committing more crimes here.
3) Courts are more willing to sentence convicted criminals to prison.
Unless the higher incarceration rate is ENTIRELY caused by the second factor, we have something to be looked into in terms of public policy.
So if the number is 6 million or 12 doesn't matter, as long as they are guilty of a crime that deserves jail time.
DOES the crime deserve jail time? And if so, why? Also, we MUST recognize the consequences to society of having such a huge prison population, in terms of recidivism rates, increased poverty, the creation of a large criminal underclass subculture. Group questions, society-wide consequence questions, should be asked, not just individual questions. Here are two important questions that need to be asked.
1) Do we have laws defining acts as crimes punishable by prison that should not be crimes? (IMO the answer is clearly yes.)
2) Are we sentencing convicted criminals to prison time that would more appropriately be punished by probation, fines, community service, and other non-prison alternatives? (IMO the answer here is also clearly yes, especially in some states. I voted this year for an initiative that would modify California's 3-strikes law to require that the third strike be a violent felony rather.)
If we legalized drugs and treated drug abuse as a medical problem rather than a criminal law problem, we would reduce the prison population dramatically, releasing a lot of nonviolent offenders that currently go to prison.
If we also relied less on prison and more on other penalties for some offenses we would reduce the prison population.
Why don't we do these things?
I have never voted in my life and don't plan to.
Well, then who cares what you think? Your opinion isn't going to count anyway.