America is still jailing a lot more people than any other modern country. So either your point is irrelevant and the system doesn't work or it's simply the criminal hotspot of western the world
1. Americans are just more likely to be criminals.
2. Other nations may be equally or even more ineffective at tackling crime.
The assumption that jail doesn't work rests on the assumption that other nations track crime as effectively and that their people are equally criminal.
> Your comments reflect all the certitude of someone who has never seen real evil up close
Real evil? Like Santa Clause and Heaven and God and Angels and Fairies?
I did not say that this system is worse than previous ones and I do not see how that ties into my argument at all. I was making a judgement on what currently exists - and it sucks.
> If the system was as broken as you claim, I seriously doubt we'd have the strength and standing among nations that you seem to ready to dismiss.
> And finally, statements like "The criminals are (for the most part) not the ones we should be worrying about" is simply indefensible. The justice system exists because people demand that it exist to protect them.
People also demand iPhones, junk food, drugs and violence. This is another logical fallacy (argumentum ad populum).
> I know many members of law enforcement.
I did not make a judgement on these people. In WW2, perfectly normal people committed atrocities because their culture and leadership dictated it. Normal people are capable of thoroughly horrible acts.
> I seriously doubt we'd have the strength and standing among nations that you seem to ready to dismiss.
You have your strength and standing because you are an empire with fingers in everyone's pie. The US has overthrown countless democractically elected leaders over the last century for profit. The world does not speak because it will be beaten for it. Why do you think the UN condems Israels actions but does nothing? This is not respect, it is fear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re...
Disagree all you want but the facts speak for themselves.
That doesn't explain the similar drops in crime in Canada, most of Europe, Australia, and a ton of other countries. The US is nearly unrivaled in incarceration, but crime hasn't dropped faster of further than in comparable developed nations with lower incarceration rates.
That is really besides the point, because this article is about the third world, or should I say medieval prison system in the USA. That system is a crime against humanity in far too many ways. It is just one of the things many Europeans just don't get why you think it's acceptible. The prison system in the USA is a major cause of crime, not a solution. No civilized country has jailed up anywhere near the percentage of the population as the USA
The point here is that the justice system is not just, that there are too many criminals not because we're a nation of people who like to do bad things, but because the system profits from making criminals out of people. If you believe that the system for imprisoning people is just, then I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this question:
Why are Americans so criminal? More than Iran, China, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia.... Why is it that Americans can't follow the rules? What is wrong with them?
Of course that assertion is absurd because, at its foundation, that logic gets very racist very fast.
Over half of all individuals in prison in the US are serving for violent offenses. Even if we released every non-violent offender currently incarcerated, the US would still be in the top 15 countries in the world for prisoners per capita.
Everyone railing against the prison system in America seems to have bought into a myth that our prison system is out of control because of harsh sentences for “minor” infractions like drug offenses and theft. The reality is that American society, for whatever reason, is more violent than most other societies in the world. You can try and make the argument that the prison system is at fault, but I think it’s more likely that other more fundamental aspects of America are larger factors contributing to it, and attempting to abolish the police or overhaul the prison system are unlikely to do much, as that’s simply treating symptoms and not the disease.
The US has the largest prison population in the world (if I recall correctly both in absolute number and as a proportion of the population), it really doesn't seem to be working out for them. So no, it's not that simple...
The U.S. has the single highest incarceration rate in the world. In that respect, we have the worst criminal justice system in the world. Other metrics matter, of course, but let's not kid ourselves: the American system is an unmitigated disaster.
You don't see the people that aren't in prison because they do see it as a disincentive. America doesn't have the highest crime rate in the world either, we simply catch more criminals and have vastly expanded the number of things that qualify as crimes, as well as lengthened sentences.
We might have more crime than other first world countries in general, but it's not like prisons are the cause of it. That doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Besides, what are you comparing it to? All other countries use prisons as well, and what would the alternative be anyways?
Part of the issue is that the United States has 25% of the world's prison population and only 6% of Total population the world. When you are the jailingest country in the world per capita by a large margin - More than Russia, Saudi Arabia, iran - You got the question how flippantly we put people in a cage.
The massive incarceration rates in the US don't seem to be solving anything, although you don't think they're enough. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world yet in your view it is barely incarcerating at all.
If China is too different, look at western Europe. England's incarceration rate is less than one third of the US's. Canada is on sixth of the US's. These countries have lower incarceration rates but less crime.
I find it funny you're being downvoted, as if people just don't like hearing the truth.
America houses more prisoners than any country in the world (around 2.4 Million). More than both China and Brazil combined, the next two highest (Brazil has recently beat out Russia for third highest prison population). To give some comparison, the combined population of China and Brazil is 1.6 Billion, compared to America's 326 Million.
I hope that this article doesn't distract us from the elephant in the room - that the US incarcerates a greater proportion of its population than any other country, with no apparent benefit in terms of crime prevention. Most of that disparity has been created since the Reagan administration's "war on drugs".
The case for abolishing prison entirely is distinctly tenuous, but there's a fairly obvious case that the US criminal justice system is needlessly costly, cruel and ineffective. Most of the arguments in defence of the status quo are tacitly racist, e.g. "European countries don't need to imprison as many people because their population isn't as diverse".
Prisons may be a necessary last resort to protect the public from violent criminals, but the US criminal justice system is riddled with genuine abominations - Three Strikes laws, plea bargains, private prison contracts with minimum occupancy quotas, the high proportion of seriously mentally ill inmates etc.
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