Locking Up the Folks

THE UNITED STATES PUTS MORE PEOPLE in prison, per capita, than any other country in the world. Its good to be number one at something. But not this. When you have a higher percentage of you rpopulation in prison than North Korea, Syria, China, Russia,and Cuba, you have a circumstance eminently worthy of scrutiny, to say the very least. Of the two million or so Americans behind bars, a very high percentage of them are non violent criminals, many drug related, many are first time offenders, and many are young black males. The war on drugs, and the war on crime got out of control, and, if we keep locking people up at the current rate, there will come a time when we are all behind bars. Perhaps, in a sense, we've already reached that point, figuratively speaking. If we continue to imprison black males, for the next thirty years, at the same rate we have for the past thirty, three out of four black American men will be in prison. Young black men are sent to prison for first time drug offenses, for five, ten, fifteen years, given no rehab help of any sort while in, then released into an alien world, totally unprepared, angry, and alienated. The racist component of the criminal justice system in America is undeniable. As a society, the United States is going nowhere, fast, doing it like this. The trick is to build fewer prisons, not more. Too many politicians have gotten elected, people like clinton and Obama, trying to prove how tough they are on crime. Clinton built prisons like some republican. Obama is no better. He wants to seem tough on crime. Locking people up like farm animals is one of our behaviors at which our descendnats will one day marvel in amazement. We could let Bernie Madoff out of prison, and he'd make a helluve burger flipper at Mickey Dees.