6.6 million people either behind bars or on probation Texas leads the nation with people in prison and on probation, and California's second in both categories. More whites than blacks on probation, but more blacks than white behind bars. Wasn't aware of Proposition 36. Californians, how is that working out? Yahoo! linked to an interesting take from a Detroit Free Press columnist on the subject of rehabilitation. Personally, I'm in favor of three-strikes-and-you're-out laws ... but the best long-term solution is preventing people from getting to the plate in the first place. Your thoughts?
I think Georgia recently passed a 2 strikes and you're out law. Personally, I think three strikes are too many. This isn't a baseball game, this is the protection of innocent American civilans. We need to actually take the punishment of crime seriously in America. That means no more country club jails. Pull the plug on the cable TV. Broadcast only! No weight lifting equipment. Let them run on the grounds for exercise. I do support getting an education for them though while they are behind bars.
The interesting thing is that the increase of people behind bars is only 1.1%, the lowest its been in 30 years. Maybe judges are starting to see the light and handing out probations instead of jail sentences for some crimes that are harmless.
I don't think that 3 strikes and you're out is such a hot idea. Not that I have lots of sympathy for repeat offenders, but I think it creates a hell of a strain on the correctional system. I also don't believe in rehabilitation, I think that we lock people us to both punish them and keep them away from the rest of society.
The U.S. has jailed a higher percentage of its population than any country in the history of the world.
This part is a very interesting debate. There aren't many penal systems in the world that are centered on rehabilitation like ours. Here, conservatives tend not to believe in rehabilitation while liberals do. In Europe, it's the opposite. Foucault, for example, wrote an essay where he warned of the fascist tendencies of the U.S. "rehabilitation" system.
That's what I've read. You probably could find single-regime exceptions in smaller countries. It is higher than Stalin's Soviet Union.
Thank the drug war and the use of mandatory minimums for drug offenders: http://www.cato.org/dailys/02-23-00.html
> Probably because Stalin just had people shot It was only the higher up party and military types that were assassinated. Regular people were sent to labor camps. There was a great need for labor in Russia. > or starved them to death. These were not criminals, so they wouldn't have been incarcerated anyway.
> They weren't prisoners, they were slaves. I feel a > lot better now. The people sent to labor camps were incarcerated. We have more people incarcerated than Stalin did. And they are working as slaves too, although as telemarketers and airline ticket representatives as opposed to miners or road builders. The people being starved were not incarcerated. They were the subjects of a demographics modification program.
"Three strikes and you're out" is an idea conceived by idiots for idiots. The sole purpose of mandatory-minimum sentencing laws is to enable politicans who vote for them to run political ads featuring black and white pictures of their opponents on bad hair days with growly V/Os intoning things like "Bill Doberman voted AGAINST mandatory life sentences for puppy stranglers." Even if there was, like, a national epidemic of judges giving inappropriately short sentences to people because those recidivist felons are so goshdarned cute, there's still the very basic problem of the cost of putting everyone we want in jail being quite a bit higher than the amount of money we're prepared to spend on the prison system.
Could be worse, check the summary of a story on the front page of my local newspaper: 1 in 20 Alabamians in correctional system
> I didn't realize that thousands of priests were higher ups. Sure they are. They have political power, and can rile people up. Besides, they don't last too long in mines.