How can anyone rationalize the fact that the United States, with only 4 percent of the world's population, incarcerates one third of all those imprisoned on planet earth. In 1980 we had only 200,000 Prisoners yet in 2006 that figure had risen to 2.3 MILLION in the so called land of the free. This is a moral issue, and the government's mishandling is not only a national disgrace but also a very costly one.
If somebody doesn't put an end to this and very soon our government will have us all walking in chains. You can literally go to prison for almost anything in the USA if you think I'm kidding watch the video.
In Canada the prison population has been controlled and reduced. They introduced a new conditional sentence. Sentences less than 2 years were suspended in many cases and the criminals required to follow strict conditions instead, including community service. The imprisonment rate in Canada fell from 115 in 1998 to 102 in 2001.
They also had a campaign of public education to point out why they were following this policy. Their public educational materials said "One only has to look at the experience of the United States to see that relying solely on incarceration is a ‘dead end street’ (a street that leads nowhere)."
They were not thrown out of power either.
So that is the third argument for introducing alternatives instead of so much prison - it is politically possible.
Let me tell you something that happened in Iran, on a visit I made earlier this year. We had a session on drugs and how to deal with drug crimes. A young man from a university stood up - a very brave young man as speaking out in Iran is not always a safe thing to do. He said "in the last few years in Iran we have put to death 8000 drug traffickers, but people are still drug trafficking. Isn’t it time we tried something else?"
He was right. In our criminal justice systems it is time to try something else.
I should also mention that our imprisonment rate is 750 in comparison to Canada's 102. This number also sets the highest imprisonment rate ever recorded in world history. Unfortunately we hold all the worlds records in locking people up especially for imaginary or so called victimless crimes.I blame both the press and the politicians for ignoring this 800 Pound gorilla like it doesn't mean anything that we imprison more people than China a dictatorial police state with several times the population of our nation. It's far worse than that as we have incarcerated more people and also at a higher rate than any other nation in world history. This includes not only present day China but also Hitler's NAZI Germany , the old USSR's infamous Gulags under Stalin , and the old racist white ruled Apartheid South Africa.
Everybody knows the failed war on drugs has created this prison industrial complex which sadly has turned our once proud nation into nothing but a miserable fucking police state filled with hate and violence. It was President Reagan who signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts in the 1980's a series of measures that allocated money for prisons and established strict mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders. The direct result of his inhumane Zero-Tolerance measures after just 8 years in office was Federal prisons nearly doubled from 1980 to 1988, largely because of changes in sentencing. For whatever ugliness that was committed in the name of the Just Say No by President Reagan's predecessors as well as the President's who followed him, it was the Reagans who, through the repetition of a moronic anti-drug slogan, Just Say No taught American children to spy on their parents and denounce them to the police a most despicable practice of both NAZISM and COMMUNISM.
I want the old America back the one that existed before Reagan and FOXNEWS although it was far from perfect our freedoms weren't under a constant threat. Even GOP was controlled by it's moderate wing back then before conservatives took it over starting with Reagan. I still have some hope especially if Barack Obama wins that the breaks might applied to stop this runaway prison population explosion. The politicians in both parties need to realize it's time to derail the drug war gravy train especially since it's not decreased the amount of drugs on the streets, drug usage , or the crime associated with drugs.