Octang Frye

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TpFl...ature=youtu.be

Sally Redux

Food for thought indeed.

JRG67

shocking

kimilseung

If it is 1 in 100 in prison now, I am curious what the figures are for those ever having been in prison.

I think there is no bad opportunity for these figures to be repeated.

Sally Redux

Also I think you can't vote if you've ever been in prison?

rpjs

Depends on the state and usually only for felonies.

OTOH I recall seeing a factoid that 40% of adult British males have a criminal record for non-traffic-related offences which suggests an awful lot of visitors are telling porkies when they fill out their ESTAs.

sir_eccles

What is interesting though is the way prison populations are used when drawing up voting districts during re-districting, yet most of the prisoners will be disenfranchised by their felony conviction.

Either don't count them in the district or let them vote surely?

Giantaxe

Still wrong imo. Once a sentence is finished, the debt to society has been repaid and rights of citizenship should be restored. Florida's Republican governor actually reversed that state's position last year, banning all felons for life from voting. Political intent?... naaah, of course not.

kimilseung

There are also restriction on getting government funded subsidised public housing, so breaking up families and forcing people back in to crime.

rpjs

Yeah 'cos everyone kno that all criminals are Democrats...

Actually the weird penalties on felons appliec even after release make a bit more sense when you consider that in English Common Law being convicted of felony meant all your land and property was forfeit to the Crown (and most felonies were capital crimes too). It's one of those areas were the UK has changed more since c.1776 than the US has.

Giantaxe

Well, we know a disproportionate percentage of blacks are jailed and that a high percentage of blacks vote Democrat...

HumphreyC

The US prison numbers are pretty shocking.

However it is not true that no society in history has imprisoned more of its own citizens if we are talking in relative terms. The current US population is 311,591,917 and there are about 2,350,800 in jail - I make that 0.75% of the citizenry behind bars. In the USSR in 1953 there were 1,727,970 in the Gulag system out of a population of 107,828,000 - or around 1.6% of the citizenry in jail. The figure would be higher probably if you counted incarceration outside the gulag - should probably also take into account that a load of people were just executed. In terms of sheer numbers Nazi Germany probably had the highest population in history during WWII but the vast majority of those weren't German citizens.

Giantaxe

There's actually an initiative on the ballot to change the three strikes law in California (talked about on the second video) so that the third strike has to be a violent crime. I bet it loses. The law was overwhelmingly popular when it was brought in and the previous attempt to reform it was easily defeated. I think it's pretty clear that a plurality of Americans like locking up lots of people for a lot of time.

sir_eccles

If only there was a rehabilitation element to their incarceration rather than just punishment, maybe just maybe they would have a chance to break the cycle when they are released. But prisons are now a for profit industry, teaching them a skill or whatnot probably cuts into the bottom line.

JRG67

I don't know about the rest of the States, but I went to NY city straight from Japan, and I was shocked at how the city seemed like a police state. I felt freer in Japan! It was a great shock to find one could neither smoke nor drink in Central Park. I soon learnt that America was no longer the land of the free... If NY is anything to go by, the police have far too many powers. The problem lies in part with the education system which does not seem to emphasize social responsibility, and thus has over-stringent laws for adults.