Max Security Prison's Debate Team Bests Harvard

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I wasn't thinking of extreme exceptions. I just meant generally.

But that's just the point. Those aren't "extreme exceptions"; he just decribed well over half the prison population's life-story, at least in part. Had he included kids who got into gangs because dad's already in prison or dead, and mom has to work three jobs to keep food on the table, so the predators get almost 24/7 to influence the kids of the neighborhood, while the authorities assume they're all already gang members and harass every kid they see, leading to a loathing of authority...

The biggest tragedy of the prison system, to me, is that I found that all but the absolute worst of them (maybe 1 in 6 were "criminally minded", or psycho/sociopaths, in the traditional sense-- still a lot, but nowhere near the majority) were actually pretty nice guys underneath their layers of programming and culture, and that under other circumstances could have lived pretty normal lives, given the environment and advantages I enjoyed. 

This fraction's implications slapped me in the face, one day, when I realized that we incarcerate approximately seven times as many people per capita as the rest of the world. We have practically set up our economic and legal system to manufacture a criminal class, millions of felons who can then fill the slave-wages part of our economy and keep certain groups from attaining power or influence.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration.aspx

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While the United States has only 5 percent of the world's population, it has nearly 25 percent of its prisoners — about 2.2 million people.

Over the past four decades, the nation's get-tough-on-crime policies have packed prisons and jails to the bursting point, largely with poor, uneducated people of color, about half of whom suffer from mental health problems.

This startling reality has cost U.S. society in many ways, concludes a sweeping National Research Council report produced by an interdisciplinary committee of researchers.

"We reached a broad consensus on what negative impacts these policies have had on individuals, on families, on communities and on the nation," says Craig Haney, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a report co-author and member of a committee that in July briefed the White House on the report's findings.

One out of every 100 American adults is incarcerated, a per capita rate five to 10 times higher than that in Western Europe or other democracies, the report found. Though the trend has slowed in recent years — from 2006 to 2011, more than half of states trimmed their prison populations — in 2012 the United States still stood as the world leader in incarceration by a substantial margin.

While the United States has 707 incarcerated people per 100,000 citizens, for example, China has 124 to 172 per 100,000 people and Iran 284 per 100,000. North Korea is perhaps the closest, but reliable numbers are hard to find; some estimates suggest 600 to 800 per 100,000. (See "Incarceration rates per 100,000" chart.)

"No other country in the world imprisons its citizens as we do in the United States," Haney says.

The prison boom also has meant more resources spent on corrections — about $60 billion annually on state and federal prisons, up from $12 billion 20 years ago, according to the Pew Center on the States.

"Our incarceration policy is very costly with relatively few benefits and a lot of deleterious effects on our economy and our families and on the fabric of our communities," says June Tangney, PhD, a psychology professor at George Mason University who studies offender rehabilitation.

"Being the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world is really something we need to take a second look at," she says. "It's not that we have any more criminals than the rest of the world; we're just doing different things with them."
How did we get here?

For decades, the United States had a relatively stable prison population. That changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some factors included a rise in crime from the 1960s to 1980s; rising concerns over crack cocaine and other drugs, resulting in huge increases in drug penalties; a move to mandatory minimum sentences; and the implementation of other tough-on-crime policies, such as "three-strikes" laws and policies to ensure prisoners served at least 85 percent of their sentences. These harsher sentencing laws coupled with the dramatic increase in drug penalties added up to a state and federal prison population of 1.5 million, up from 200,000 in 1973. And that's not including nearly 750,000 Americans in jails on a daily basis (as well as an annual jail population of close to 13 million, says Tangney). [...] 

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(Bolded empasis my own.)