Nobody in the world loves locking people behind bars as much as Americans do. We have more people in prison than any other nation on the planet. We also have a higher percentage of our population locked up than anyone else does by a very large margin. But has all of this imprisonment actually made us safer? Well, the last time I checked, crime was still wildly out of control in America and for the most recent year that we have numbers for violent crime was up 15 percent. The number of people that we have locked up has quadrupled since 1980, but this is not solving any of our problems. Clearly, what we are doing is not working.
Nobody wants more crime. And it seems logical that locking more people up and keeping them in prison for longer terms would “clean up our streets” and make our communities safer. But instead, we have spawned a “prison industrial complex” that costs taxpayers more than 60 billion dollars a year but that does very little to turn the lives of the men and women inside around. The chart posted below is a bit old, but it shows that we have a massive problem with recidivism in this country…
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6 comments:
Those 21 remarkable facts failed to mention how many new prisons are under construction.My guess is darn few or none.Since this is the career choice of criminals at least build 50 new prisons(to begin with,one in each state).If this is the way they choose to go,turn it into jobs in all phases of corrections.Take full advantage of those who cannot be rehabilitated.
10:43 Own stock in a private prison company?
As long as other countries can export their criminals here, we will always be a prison state
IIRC one of the factors credited with reductions in crime over the last decade or so (not citing specifics) was that a lot of the bad guys were in stir and unable to prey of innocent folks.
I'm perfectly satisfied to have thugs off the street, indefinitely.
America is full of criminals. period.
12;20 fails to recognize who gets to define "criminal". Think about that for a second.
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