Richard Gunderman at
The Atlantic writes
The Incarceration Epidemic—
About one-fourth of all incarcerated people on Earth are in the U.S. That constitutes a public health problem:
| The U.S. incarceration rate has more than quadrupled since 1980. It's now the highest in the world, just ahead of Russia and Rwanda. It is estimated that approximately 2.3 million Americans are now behind bars. This is about one-fourth of all the incarcerated people on Earth, though the U.S. represents only one-twentieth of the world's population. When the figures for those under probation and parole are added, about 1 in 18 U.S. men is under some form of monitoring or control. The figure for blacks is 1 in 11.
From a medical point of view, the number 2.3 million is huge. It is double the number of Americans infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. People in prison are much more likely to carry and contract a variety of communicable diseases, including tuberculosis, syphilis, and hepatitis B and C. Recent articles in The Atlantic have detailed horrible prison conditions and egregious abuses of mentally ill prisoners. From a medical perspective, putting someone in prison is putting them in harm's way.
Why have U.S. incarceration rates skyrocketed? The answer is not rising crime rates. In fact, crime rates have actually dropped by more than a quarter over the past 40 years. Some look at these statistics and find confirmation of their view that expanding prison populations reduces crime rates. In fact, however, these same decreases have occurred even in places where incarceration rates have remained unchanged.
New sentencing guidelines have been a key factor. They have reduced judges' discretion in determining who goes to jail and increased the amount of time convicts sentenced to jail spend there. A notable example is the so-called "three-strikes" law, which mandates sentences ranging from 25 years to life for many repeat offenders. Though championed as protecting the public, such sentences have resulted in long confinements for many non-violent offenders, who constitute half of all inmates.
Perhaps the single greatest contributor has been the so-called "war on drugs," which has precipitated a 12-fold increase in the number of incarcerated drug offenders. About 1.5 million Americans are arrested each year for drug offenses, one-third of whom end up in prison. Many are repeat offenders caught with small quantities of relatively innocuous drugs, such as marijuana, a type of criminal activity often referred to as "victimless." [...]
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006—Bush admin used phone record brokers to bypass search warrants:
| Remember those online phone record brokers where you could buy anyone's records for a fee? Aravosis underscored how nefarious those services were by buying Wesley Clark's records and the subsequent attention led the House to unanimously pass a bill outlawing the practice.
Well, guess who was a big customer of those phone records? Yeah, I gave it away in the title of this post, but it still boggles my mind. The Bush Administration. Aravosis explains:
[T]oday we learn that the federal government and local police were using these questionably-legal online data brokers to get YOUR private phone records without the necessary search warrants.
Yes, the Bush administration once again didn't go to courts of law to get search warrants when it was supposed to.
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Tweet of the Day:
FAR RIGHT PENCHANT for the EXTREME: They define #BABY as a twinkle in your eye and #FREEDOM as twelve tons of assault weapons in your trunk.
— @citizensrock
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show, NN13 kicks off!
Greg Dworkin's roundup includes polling on CIR, John Harwood's
NYT piece "Dissent Festers in States That Obama Seems to Have Forgotten," reaction to (and reaction to the reactions to) the death of Michael Hastings, and more. Pop culture news on Paula Deen, James Gandolfini. An update from
Armando in San Jose. The strange chain of arrests among the AZ Minutemen border "patrol" crazies, and the rise of armed "community watches" as a function of austerity.
Slate's important update to its interactive gun deaths feature.
Mother Jones on waste in border security spending. The 1st & 2nd amendments clash.
High Impact Posts. Top Comments.
