Often when i read about criminal justice and most importantly sentencing of people convicted of crimes i constantly get the impression that Americans just don't get how utterly dysfunctional their criminal justice system(s) are compared to other western countries of comparable development.
In particular when it comes to prison conditions there's a huge difference and the US seems more akin to Mexico or Brazil than France, Germany or Netherlands. Combined with prison sentences that are often orders of magnitude longer than this results in a utterly country that brutalizes its citizens and thus contributes to high levels of crime.
This Washington post article helps demonstrate the huge difference:
http://ift.tt/29wBWls
American populist "tough-on-crime" politicians relying on alarmist fear mongering have poisoned the discourse around criminal justice so much that the people who are now trying to fix the broken system, such as by reducing the length of prison sentences (and bringing them in line with other western countries), have to tread really carefully in order to avoid being open to attacks from political opponents.
In particular when it comes to prison conditions there's a huge difference and the US seems more akin to Mexico or Brazil than France, Germany or Netherlands. Combined with prison sentences that are often orders of magnitude longer than this results in a utterly country that brutalizes its citizens and thus contributes to high levels of crime.
This Washington post article helps demonstrate the huge difference:
Quote:
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If you were to visit a prison in the Netherlands anytime soon, you might find it surprisingly empty. Just this week, the Dutch Justice Ministry announced that the total number of inmates held in Dutch prisons fell by 27 percent between 2011 and 2015. To put the Dutch situation into an American context, a 27 percent drop in the U.S. prison population would mean the release of almost 600,000 people. That's roughly the population of Milwaukee. The situation in the Netherlands would seem to buck a broader and longer global trend of rising prison populations. In February, the Institute for Criminal Policy Research published a report that estimated the world's prison population had grown by almost 20 percent between 2000 and 2015, a margin above the 18 percent growth in the general population during that period. In its own report, the Dutch prison ministry notes that it now has one of the lowest incarceration rates in Europe, with 57 out of 100,000 citizens imprisoned, second only to Finland at 54 per 100,000. England and Wales had the highest in Europe at 148 per 100,000, the report noted, though even that lags far behind the rate in United States, which was recently estimated at 693 per 100,000. |
American populist "tough-on-crime" politicians relying on alarmist fear mongering have poisoned the discourse around criminal justice so much that the people who are now trying to fix the broken system, such as by reducing the length of prison sentences (and bringing them in line with other western countries), have to tread really carefully in order to avoid being open to attacks from political opponents.
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/29yqbdu
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