Discussion on the conditions of low-security prisons in the US should be secondary to discussions about why so many Americans are in prison in the first place, IMO.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison#Population_statistics
You are right and the prison situation in the USA is not ok. But that said, just as this situation could be called f--ked up, also keep in mind that many parts of US society are also REALLY F--KED UP. There's a lot of injustice and racism throughout the criminal "justice" system, but there's also a sick amount of senseless, senseless violence.
Source: Friends and family who are prosecutors and public defenders. A relative of mine was once in the position of having to defend a group of teenagers who lynched and murdered a stranger on the street with golf clubs.
Maybe without agreeing, you can at least understand the motivation for [definitely short sighted] tough-on-crime programs.
It seems to me that one of the biggest questions on this issue that Americans need to face is: are you punishing or are you rehabilitating? I don't pretend to have a universally applicable and useful answer to that question, but societies should at least be very clear about which option is being chosen and what the consequences of that choice are.
It seems to me that there is a third option: isolating. Some people we cannot cure, but should not be "punished". Even so, they need to be kept away from the general population for the sake of the population.
I personally think that using imprisonment as a sort of "punishment" is barbaric and has no place in a civilized society. It should only be used to rehabilitate or, barring that possibility, isolate. You have someone who just won't stop killing people and your psychologists are at a loss as to how to turn him into a safe productive member of society? By all means, keep him locked up and off the streets, but trying to frame this detainment as a "punishment" is how we start down a very dark road.
I believe the privitisation of the penal system in the US has set the stage for all kinds of misdirected incentives. I wonder if some who benefit from the system as it stands are in fact quite happy to perpetuate the need for revenge/punishment.
I do none the less understand the impulse for revenge on an individual level. Anyone who says they don't must have had a charmed life indeed. I just think it's time we start consciously removing such instincts from our penal systems.
This doesn't happen in Europe, for example, because European countries are ethnically homogeneous. The reason is WWII, which was really just the rest of WWI, which started because of tensions over ethnic minorities -- officially in the Balkans but more so in Austria-Hungary, which was really just a club of little states pretending to be one big one.
As Tony Judt put it in his (fantastic) history of Europe after 1945, "The stability of postwar Europe is due in large part to the achievements of Hitler and Stalin."
As a European, I feel pretty sure you've never been to Europe. Your assertions are almost comically inaccurate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Europe#By_coun...
Reading down the list, most European nations have around 80% or more majority ethnicity. Even those with lower majorities tend to have closely related minorities, e.g. Belgium with its Flemings and Walloons.
By comparison the largest racial/ethnic group in the U.S., non-Latino whites, is under 65% and shrinking.
All that said, I personally think the high rate of imprisonment in the U.S. reflects a lot of latent to overt racism and can't be defended. I think that was the GP's point but I'm not sure.
But most of the crime is in the big cities, which attract people from all around Europe. Using the population statistics for countries as a whole could be seen as a little disingenuous with that in mind. Though, I'd be willing to bet that the Gini coefficient is more relevant a measure.
Tony one - of - our - most - dazzling - public - intellectuals Judt? Whose special expertise was modern European history?
This is taken from the introduction to POSTWAR, finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize:
""" p. 9
We should not idealize this [pre-1914] Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called 'the incredible, almost comical melting pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe' was perilously rent with riots, massacres, and pogroms -- but it was real, and it survived into living memory.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, THAT Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking into the second half of the 20th century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after WWII Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities -- the Jews in France, for example -- represented a tiny fraction of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union -- an empire, not a country, and anyway only part-European -- stood aside from this new, serially homogeneous Europe.
But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future... voluntary and involuntary migrants from failed or repressive states at Europe's expanded margins have turned London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan, and a dozen other places into cosmopolitan world cities whether they like it or not.
This presence of Europe's living 'others' -- perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the EU as currently [2005] constituted, for example, with a further eighty million awaiting admission in Bulgaria and Turkey -- has thrown into relief not just Europe's current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead 'others' of Europe's past were cast far out of mind. Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.
"""
On my trips to Europe I have seen students in Prague (none in Plzen), Arabs in Paris, some British tourists in Ljubljana.
Overall I was not surprised to learn that when Poles gained the right to emigrate by acceding to the EU, the richer member nations were swept by waves of anxiety over the arrival of a slightly different kind of white person.
And it wasn't before 1980? That's news to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
"...and easy to vote for stiff penalties for criminals who don't look like you."
That's a reference to the Drug War. Which Reagan cranked into high gear in the 1980s, in response to the crack epidemic, by introducing mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. Penalties for possessing crack were, infamously, 100 times those for an equivalent amount of powder cocaine. Congress revisited the issue in 2011 and reduced the ratio. Now it's just 20:1.
Most crack users are black, and so, as a result, are disproportionately many prison inmates. Only 13% of the population is black. The other 87% continue to vote enthusiastically for politicians who are "tough on crime".