U.S.-Full Stats

Via A Tiny Revolution

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Vengeance Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

It’s always struck me as odd that a country so passionate about freedom be so quick to deny it to so many of its own citizens.

When you read the numbers below, keep two facts in mind: (1) only 15 percent of arrests involve serious property theft or violence; (2) we keep 10 times more people in prison than we did in 1970 when the crime rate was actually higher.

– The US has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of all prison inmates.
– The US incarceration rate is the world’s highest, five to eight times higher than those of other industrialized nations.
– Liberty-obsessed America has a million more prisoners than China, a police state with four times our population.
– One third of all black males and 60 percent of black high school dropouts will go to prison at some point in their lives.
– African-Americans serve as much time in federal prison for a typical drug offense as whites do for a violent crime.
– African-Americans constitute 14% of the nation’s drug users (roughly their fraction of the general population) but 56% of people imprisoned for a drug offense.
– Over 5 million people are denied the right to vote because of a prior conviction.

Which brings us again to the Iron Law of Institutions: If the Democrats passed a law restoring to former convicts the right to vote, they might well secure for themselves a permanent majority. But whoever pushed for such a measure would likely pay a price. And, remember, a politician shall never willingly endanger his/her position.

One silver lining is the growing recognition from our top leaders that excessive prison sentencing is unbearably cruel and must be stopped at all costs!

I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the [30-month] prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.
George W. Bush, 07/02/07

Jessica Hall, on the other hand, was not deemed worthy of a presidential pardon. A mother of three with a husband on his third tour in Iraq, she was sentenced to two years in prison for throwing a McDonald’s ice cup at another car that cut her off while driving. She had no prior record and the tragic consequence of her "road rage" was the unfortunate spilling of McDonald’s water on another car. She spent nearly two months in jail before the uproar created by the decision caused her sentence to be commuted to probation.

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