Seven and one half Americans out of every one thousand (a total between 2.3 and 2.4 million people) are behind bars in jail or prison. That depressingly large percentage of the population means that the United States imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than does any other country. By comparison, Russia is in second place with six out of one thousand citizens behind bars, Iran is fourth with 2.25 of every one thousand people in prison; China, Canada, France, and Germany all have less than 1.5 of every one thousand citizens in prison.
The proportion of Americans in prison has quadrupled since 1970.
Imprisoning someone is expensive for taxpayers – from an annual cost per year per inmate of $18,000 in Mississippi to over $50,000 in California. (Data from “Rough justice in America: Too many laws, too many prisoners,” The Economist, July 25, 2010 and “Rough justice in America,” The Economist, July 22, 2010)
Rejecting the premises that U.S. citizens are more prone to break laws than the citizens of other nations, more violent, and less amenable to other forms of correction, the American criminal justice system clearly needs a major overhaul. Here are a few suggestions:
• Give judges more discretion to tailor the punishment to the crime, e.g., not all drug offenses merit the same punishment.
• More narrowly focus “three strikes and your out” laws to permanently imprison only violent felons.
• Reduce the number of criminal offenses, e.g., legalize and then tax marijuana, thereby eliminating the criminal culture that now envelops the growth, distribution, marketing, and consumption of marijuana.
• Increase reliance on other forms of punishment, e.g., restitution and confinement at home that cost government less to implement.
• More broadly, improve opportunities for the least advantaged, making productive lives more attractive in comparison to lives of crime.
Imprisoning over 2,000,000 Americans at an annual cost of $600,000,000,000 ($600 billion) increases my tax burden while making me, at best, perhaps marginally safer. We must find a better, more Christian solution to crime.
1 comments:
A reader sent, by email, this insightful comment about creating an entirely new definition of "nation":
To some extent, multinational corporations already have. Certainly at Nortel we were cognizant of national sovereignty – HR laws, for example, and tariffs (although decreasingly a factor). On the other hand, talent and ideas moved across borders rather freely. As employees we were much more concerned about what our multinational competitors were doing than what individual nations did. Short of World War III, the company was sufficiently diversified that an individual war or two, or shutdown in an individual country or two, was inconvenient but little else.
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