A nation's brutal approach to punishment

[milmor_1]

A nation's brutal approach to punishment
By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 15 August 2007
The persistence of the death penalty is only one way in which the United States stands out from the rest of the Western world on crime and punishment.

It also has the highest incarceration rate of any country, with more than two million people behind bars. (China, second in the rankings, has an estimated 1.5 million, and Russia just short of 900,000.) The US has just 5 per cent of the world's population, but 25 per cent of its overall prison population.

Some of the reasons behind the extraordinary machinery of incarceration - including the death penalty - is cultural and historical. In the South, in particular, the phenomenon is inextricably linked to the long history of racial inequality, with blacks put away in numbers vastly disproportionate to their overall population.

The states with the highest ratio of prisoners per population are all former slave states with long traditions of jailhouse brutality, chain gangs and other barbaric practices: Louisiana (816 prisoners per 100,000 people), Texas (694) and Mississippi (669). In many states, blacks are up to 15 times as likely as whites to find themselves behind bars. In Florida, one in three adult black men has a criminal record.

Some trends, though, are more recent - tied, in particular, to the mania for tough-on-crime legislation that has swept state after state in the past 25 years.

The national prison population has quadrupled since 1980, the increase fuelled in particular by the "war on drugs" and the consequent incarceration of hundreds of thousands of petty drug offenders. That, in turn, has exacerbated a host of problems from overcrowding to prison rape to the formation of ultra-violent prison gangs, many of them based on deep racial hatred.

In many cases, prison has taken the place of social services such as drug rehabilitation and mental health counselling and, according to critics of the system, has, in effect, criminalised large portions of the population who would have been much better and much more cheaply treated elsewhere.

Prison guard unions have become major political players, especially in California, home to the single largest prison system in the world, where they bankroll the campaigns of senior state officials and lawmakers. A whole industry has sprung up to support the burgeoning prison population. One writer, Eric Schlosser, memorably described the entire system a few years ago as a "prison-industrial complex".

At a time of tight state budgets, prisons are one area where lawmakers do not hold back from spending lavishly. From next year, California will be spending more on prisons than on its entire higher education system, including close to $1m on a new death row unit at San Quentin outside San Francisco - despite the statewide moratorium on executions. The United States as a whole spends an estimated $60bn a year on its prisons.

A nation's brutal approach to punishment - Independent Online Edition > Americas

[sabadgeman]

There is much the same debate here in the UK. The government is embarking on a massive prison building program and for a time the population so exceeded spaces that prisoners were being held in police cells as a temporary measure.

It seems to be an Anglo-Saxon problem as we have the highest prison population in the European union.

We have a rapidly rising female population as well especially in the commercial and crime against person categories

[Snowden]

I am surprised that one other result of this prison population is not mentioned, especially at this time. That is that terrorists are tossed in with the regular prison population, and there is no more fertile territory for cultivating willing hands to take on some of the work of terrorism. This happens in Israel, and it probably happens in most if not all prison systems.

They "evangelize" for terrorists, and they get them. After all, why would convicts in such a system love the state or nation that puts them there?

[KBay84]

The death penalty is well deserved, needed and called for. America need only look to Europe and see the state of disrepair upon its culture to know that Europe's "Age of Enlightenment" is only weakness that criminals will exploit to the Nth degree. Taking away the rights of the free (i.e. gun rights) and giving criminals every leeway is criminal stupidity in and of itself. I have listened to enough idiocy from Europeans to know that what we are doing here is just A OK. Actually, we need to get rid of a passel of liberals and tighten the screws a wee tad. When the correctional officers are placed under constraints so tights that basically the inmates run the facilities, and the law enforcement officers are sued by the convicts for doing their jobs (i.e. justified handling of unruly cons, disturbance quelling, etc.), there is a real problem.

The death penalty is well deserved by those who have incurred it. They have been deemed as humans convicted of horrible crimes, and cannot be changed by corrective behavior. We tax payers foot the bill for them to live by standards better than our deployed armed forces. Farq that I'll buy the bullet, just smoke them and bury them.

[Caldric]

The only problem with the death penalty is the constant pro-criminal scumbags. What happened to embracing the victims and punishing the criminal?

I think prisoners should work 12 hours a day at hard labor you would soon see the cult of prisoners diminish. Don't sit around all day cooking up ways to beat the system get out and break their backs. Make prison so hard that the idea of going their strikes fear in the hearts of people. Then we will see a change.

Brutal punishment? Ever seen a child beg to live as they are being raped by a grown man then buried alive? Ever seen a college student on her knees begging for the right to live while some scumbag stands over her and gets an orgasm from her begging? I haven't thank god however I hope when they drag the killers to their death they cry and beg and whine and get beat all the way to chair or table. I say if anything we don't use it enough to deter.

Any person who can watch a child beg for mercy and then brutally use their bodies and then murder them should be executed while they beg for life.

Many Europeans want the death penalty yet the governments there think they know what is best for the people. Just ask the former German foreign minister who said “The difference between the US and Europe is that in the US the people tell the government what to do but in Europe we lead the people, we know what is best”. Of course it wasn't his daughter begging for her life. That makes him a Piece of ****.

[Caldric]

Also the weak knee argument that the state should not hold life and death over its people is a joke. We hire policemen and put in their hand the right of life and death; they are trained and given the incredible power to decide life and death in a heartbeat. They must react and decide what must be done and we trust them with good reason. That same officer of the law will put himself in the line of fire for any of us at any time, they are a phone call away and they will be there no matter who is attacking. They will use their deadly force if it is needed and they will take fire in return to defend us. Yet we question the right of the state to have power over life and death. Yet send out young men and women soliders to cause death to our enemy. Milmor is a soldier (which I have great respect for) and he would use deadly force in a blink of an eye if put in that situation. What is the difference between the Soldier the Policemen and the Courts to defend their people?

Nothing, nothing at all. The state has a monopoly on life and death and we embrace that everyday.

[Caldric]

ops