One wonders what sort of prison and judicial reform could ever happen in a system like the US has?
The entire thing is so deeply entrenched at so many levels I doubt it could be done cleanly if at all.
The entire thing is so deeply entrenched at so many levels I doubt it could be done cleanly if at all.
For some reason, the U.S. is just an incredibly violent society. Our justice system has evolved in light of that.
As far as what reforms are possible, how about releasing everyone who has committed victimless crimes (drugs, prostitution, etc.)? The "justice" system in this country has lost all credibility because such crimes are mainly used to target minorities and the poor. Treating inmates humanely would also help. Removing the profit incentives of prisons would go a long way towards this as well. Not sending people to jail because they can't pay $100 fine would also be a huge step. There are many things society can do to keep a lot of the "low-level" offenders from ever getting into prison and becoming hardened criminals. For most people, once they're in prison, it's too late.
Homicide is a significant component of all US crime. There's no way to look at the numbers and characterize them as "very small".
If you released everyone currently imprisoned for drug crimes, you'd set free about 250,000 people, which is great, but you'd be leaving 1.1 million people incarcerated. Drugs aren't the big problem. Something else is.
(Prostitution, a "public order" offense, is a rounding error --- women represent 5% of all public order offenses, meaning that the category captures not just prostitution but is a whole myriad of offenses mostly committed by men. Very few women are actually imprisoned for prostitution; Texas is newsworthy for having around 300 of them, against a 5-figure female prison population).
In 2010, roughly 1% of violent crimes were murders. [1] Combine this with nonviolent crimes, I'd say that's plausibly a "very small percent".
Not that I'm trying to say murder is not a problem. Killing people is bad, 'mkay.
1. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/c...
An incarceration for a victimless adult crime, or for a 'status offense' as a juvenile, is an excellent start to eventually turn a harmless person into a murderer. By reducing the number of crippling interventions into the lives of people who haven't committed significant harm, you likely reduce the population of murderers in prison 20 years from now.
The 3 month drug arrest is enough to keep you from getting a job, from getting college loans, and long enough to get you fairly deeply connected in a gang culture.
edit: can't quickly find stats, but the national arrest chart on http://prostitutionprocon.org/arrests.htm shows arrest numbers from 1994 to 2004. For 2004, the combined number for rape, robbery, and murder is around 120K, and aggravated assault adds another 380K. Drug violations accounted for 1.5M.
edit2: http://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezaucr/asp/ucr_display.asp
It's a good point, the turnover in prison population for lesser crimes compared to that of murder convicts, but it still doesn't support the argument upthread.
I do agree with your point thought that the US just seems to be more violent. Are serial killers and the like mainly a US phenomenon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
I don't know that I'd say 'evolved'. You said it yourself: the homicide rate has been 5-7x higher than in England for more than a century.
We're not really doing anything different than what we used to do - a punitive justice system, sometimes morally dubious punishment, and total 'othering' of convicted criminals. I don't know that we can really be shocked when nothing changes.
Err, so there was an erroneous decade where we tried to do better?
The mid 50s-60s were a discrepancy in american history in a multitude of ways, so I'm not sure that I'd consider prison reform any different in that regard.
I also wouldn't consider a decade as representative of the american justice system when we have plenty of evidence that it's not representative of either the past (where we used to just hang people after three strikes) or the present (where, as you noted, we have three strikes laws).
In fact, it seems as though once a century we'll have a decade where they half-heartedly try to implement rehabilitative reforms, keep at it for maybe the better half of a decade, and then act shocked that it hasn't decimated incarceration rates yet. Shockingly, it takes longer than a few years to reform a society.