America please stop jailing so many people! What is it with the excessively large prison population? Is there something about American culture that creates so many scumbags? Before anyone calls me a liberal on criminal justice I say I support the execution of the Boston bombers.
It's quite simple, there's a lot of $$$ invested in for profit prisons so they need a lot of customers or else the job creators would lose money which would be bad for the economy. And if the job creators lose money they can't make campaign donations to all those nice politicians and judges who make the laws that keep the prisons full of customers. So a large prison population is in everybody's interest (well, except all those people in prison of course but they can't vote anyway so nobody cares about them).
The truth of the matter is, that the US prison population was swelling to epic numbers, even before the trend towards the privatization of prisons had gained much traction.
And, of course, when comparing the US prison population against that of other countries, we must take into account a number of factors, and we should be dealing in percentages of total population, rather than raw numbers, in order to give the comparison more credibility.
But, there also seems to be no escaping of the premise that the US has a large prison population, with respect to both raw numbers and percentage of the total population.
In the US, we have historically (at least in the 20th) warehoused much of our minority populations within otherwise partially-abandoned Inner Cities, as the generations-spanning impact of the White Flight of the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s continue to be felt.
Generally speaking, and beyond the realm of lip-service for appearance's sake, few outside those enclaves really give a rat's ass what happens within those enclaves (ghettos).
So, when we have 3 or 4 or 5 generations of Ghetto Dwellers who lose more ground with each passing generation, well, larger and larger numbers of those Ghetto Dwellers are likely to end-up in jail.
Dog bites man.
No surprise there.
MEH.
Better in jail than on the streets.
