Glenn C. Loury at the Boston Reveiw asked a much-needed question. Why does America take away so many of its citzens' liberties?
According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia).
Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. ...
One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders.
Why? Writes Loury:
A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.
Loury posits the war on drugs and America's continuing essential racism as other contributing factors to the obscenely high incarceration rate, and correctly identifies and indicts the American voters who routinely reward the punitive-inclined policymakers.
But I think Loury ignores the two main culprits: Fear and fear-mongering careerism.
The fear that a family will typically feel for another family member in an violence-obsessed media-society and the political careerists (like in Dane County, Wisconsin, District Atty Brian Blanchard and former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson) who will cater to the most base instincts and insecurities clears the field for other punitive-inclined policymakers who in their liberty-depriving, family-destroying frenzy make America about as freedom-loving a place domestically as it is a peace-loving presence in its foreign policy abroad.
Loury does make mention of a population "(s)toked by fear and political opportunism ... ," but in a depoliticized society like the United States where fear and lavish attention to the trivial and meaningless (celebrity, reality shows, sports and so on) continue, I think Loury needs to link the violent prison-industrial complex as a logical outgrowth of our depoliticized culture maintained by the corporate-media.
Encouraging a population not to think will inevitably result in more state violence such the liberty-destroying criminal justice system domestically. ###
http://malcontends.blogspot.com/
Michael Leon is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. His writing has appeared nationally in The Progressive, In These Times, and CounterPunch. He can be reached at maleon64@yahoo.com.
This article raises some very important points. America is supposed to be the land of the free and yet we are the most enslaved. "they atack us because of our freedoms" - Rudy Giuliani.
Sorry Rudy "they attack us because we're ovver there..." -Ron Paul
"None are more enslaved than those who falsely beleive that they are free" -can't remember who said that
by
J. Vorhees (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 66 comments)
on Monday, July 16, 2007 at 6:28:16 PM
the institutional agenda of our present education system is to be held accountable in the societal failure to embue critical thinking among the citizenry. this is where the indoctrination of ignorance begins, by design.
read up, free online & in entirety:
J.T. Gatto's Underground History of American Education
Each prison innmate costs approximately $33,00 per year to house. Corporate America increasingly operate the prisons. Do the math! To me, it is mainly just another way to transfer wealth from the general public to the rich guy on the hill. Unless violent, I see no real reason to pay for a criminal to be held seperate from society under conditions that include exposure to HIV from rape. Cruel and unusual punishment is what prison is all about.
by
Roger (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 332 comments)
on Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 4:26:35 PM
A very large percentage of the violent offenders aren't.
The latest fad in Policing is to charge victims with violent offenses to keep them from being able to defend themselves.
The new rules mean that simple touch is assault, so that any touch in warding off a sudden attack by a police officer is recorded as assault on that police officer!
And if even that does not happen, it becomes the word of the officer vs the word of the defendant, who has been charged with several counts of violence in the first place, so who will a jury believe, if it ever gets to a jury.
Because the other new trend is that overworked and underfunded and generally media slimed defense attorneys have no time for an actual defense, and become simply negotiators that get many fake charges to become a guilty plea to just a couple thus having the verdict created before and instead of a trial.
Any claim for an honest trial, offends all involved, so the defense does not support the defendant, the Judge is annoyed and prejudiced, the prosecutor is vindictive, and the police defensive that any pronouncement they make is not considered gospel, and emboldening the Criminal element.
That is not to say that there are not some really bad actors out there, even outside of government, but increasingly they are not the ones who get caught up, as they are actively avoiding the ever more random assaults on freedom that innocent folk are not even aware of until it is too late.
by
Freedem (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 16 comments)
on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 9:19:55 AM
