POLIHOP: America's Overflowing Prisons Are A National Embarassment

Friday, November 7, 2008

America's Overflowing Prisons Are A National Embarassment

From Citizen-time.com:

After decades of directing the world from atop its throne of moral authority, the United States has finally lost its perch. No one else has yet ascended to that exalted seat, so for the moment the international righteousness championship and the financial competence championship both remain vacant.

America forsook those titles by succumbing to the lures of unprovoked war, shameless torture, unsustainable greed, mistreatment of the poor, and vast overuse of prisons. As even hermits know by now, we suffer the highest incarceration rate in the world. Indeed, one author has deemed us the rogue state of imprisonment.

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Can you believe that 1 in every 100 U.S. adults is physically in jail, and that 1 in 32 is under some kind of state control? Too bad we can’t see all those jumpsuits and electronic anklets at the same time. It might jolt us into some policy changes.

Worse yet, 1 in 9 young black men are in the klink. No diploma in sociology is required to grasp how that number is a natural product of our society. Bad schools, bad housing, bad diet, bad health care, and biased law enforcement are not designed to breed productive citizens.

America's Prison Industrial Complex is something I'm hoping the Obama administration deal with. For this nation to lead the world in incarcerations means there is a societal problem here. I know there are individuals that should be removed from society but there are a lot of people in prison that could be rehabilitated, some just need a better chance in life.

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