Dangerous Ideas

Turns out the U.S. leads the world in incarceration. That’s both in number of prisoners kept and also the highest ratio of prisoners to the general population:

A U.S. Justice Department report released on November 30 showed that a record 7 million people – or one in every 32 American adults – were behind bars, on probation or on parole at the end of last year. Of the total, 2.2 million were in prison or jail.

Other countries are able to keep their numbers lower partly because of less severe laws, but also because they tend to emphasize treatment instead of incarceration for drug offenses.

It’s another sign of our punishment culture … In California, we have things like Three Strikes. We seem to like punishing people after the fact more than we like investing in preventing crime in the first place. It would be great to see a report detailing the cost differences (both money wise and social) between punitive laws and preventive programs.