The American criminal justice system is aptly named. It is criminal the way the system dispenses “justice,” and that criminality infests the entire system. That’s because the system has become a business and a blood sport based on profit, control and winning rather than determining a person’s guilt or innocence.
The result is that the U.S. has 6 to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as does Australia, Canada, France Germany, Japan or the United Kingdom. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its incarcerated people, and half of the world’s academically qualified lawyers, Those lawyers consume about 10 percent of America’s gross domestic product.
There are about 2.3 million people populating America’s 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories. In the U.S., people go to jail about 11 million times each year. Another 7 million are on parole or probation.
There is no question that America is a prison nation, and the overwhelming majority of people in prisons are there for non-violent crimes — about 20 percent of them for drug crimes. One in 3 Americans will be arrested by the age of 23. Those “crimes” are often nothing more than truancy and misbehaving in school. But the faux war on drugs has ensnared millions of Americans for the non-crime of possessing parts of a plant. Read more.
