Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Here Are All Of The Nations That Incarcerate More Of Their Population Than The U.S.

A lot has been reported about our nation's prison system and its bloated population, but this is what it looks like when you take all of the countries that jail more people than we do and put them into one GIF.

tumbleweed


Yeah, we're actually number one and that's not a good thing.

No country incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than the United States. At 716 per 100,000 people, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies, the U.S. tops every other nation in the world.


(Graphic via Statista)

Among OECD countries, the competition isn't even close -- Israel comes in second, at 223 per 100,000.

According to advance 2012 counts by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. prison population was 1,571,013 at yearend. That's actually a decline for the third consecutive year. Including local and city jail figures, however, that number easily tops two million, around 25 percent of the entire world's prisoners.

On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced sweeping plans designed to address the issue through drug-sentencing reform. Holder's blueprint included plans to divert low-level drug offenders to treatment and community service programs and implement an expanded prison program to allow for the release of some elderly, non-violent offenders.

"We need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter and rehabilitate - not merely to convict, warehouse and forget," Holder said in remarks to the American Bar Association in San Francisco. "Although incarceration has a role to play in our justice system, widespread incarceration at the federal, state and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable. ... It imposes a significant economic burden -- totaling $80 billion in 2010 alone -- and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate."

Original Article
Source: huffingtonpost.com
Author: Nick Wing

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