← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Centinel
Thread ID: 6027 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2003-04-07
2003-04-07 09:53 | User Profile
From The Associated Press, available online at: [url=http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local/state/hc-07015826.apds.m0581.bc-ct--prisapr07,0,2644369.story?coll=hc-headlines-local-wire]http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local...ines-local-wire[/url]
U.S. prisons and jails now hold record 2 million inmates
Associated Press April 7, 2003
WASHINGTON -- The number of people in U.S. prisons and jails last year topped 2 million for the first time, driven by get-tough sentencing policies that mandate long terms for drug offenders and other criminals, the government reported Sunday.
The federal government accounted for more inmates than any state, with almost 162,000, according to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the Justice Department. That number includes the transfer of about 8,900 District of Columbia prisoners to the federal system.
California, Texas, Florida and New York were the four biggest state prison systems, mirroring their status as the most populous states.
Connecticut saw its inmate population rise 7.2 percent from 18,875 in 2001 to 20,243 last year.
Texas, California, New York, Illinois and five other states saw their inmate populations drop compared with the year before as prison releases outpaced admissions.
Some states modified parole rules to deal with steep budget shortfalls, leading to an overall growth rate in state prison populations of just under 1 percent from June 2001 to June 2002. The federal prison population grew by 5.7 percent.
The total inmate population on June 30, 2002, was 2.1 million, an increase of 2.8 percent from the year before. Two-thirds were in federal or state prisons, with the other third held in jails, the report said.
The report did not count all juvenile offenders, which if included in the past would have driven the nation's inmate population over the 2 million mark years ago. But the report did note that there were more than 10,000 inmates under age 18 held in adult prisons and jails last year.
Malcolm Young, executive director of The Sentencing Project, said the increase continues a prison growth trend stemming from tough penalties meted out to drug abusers and traffickers as well as "three strikes" laws that can mandate life sentences for repeat offenders.
"It's part of the get-tough scheme. It's been going on for 30 years," said Young, whose nonprofit organization advocates alternatives to incarceration, such as drug courts and treatment programs.
This is especially true at the federal level, where efforts to reduce sentences for such crimes as crack cocaine trafficking - far higher than sentences for dealing in powder cocaine - have failed in Congress.
The Supreme Court this month upheld California's "three strikes" law even though the defendant's final crime involved theft of golf clubs. Attorney General John Ashcroft has pushed for tougher prison sentences, including a recent directive barring many people convicted of white-collar and nonviolent crimes from doing their time in halfway houses. n "The prospect of prison, more than any other sanction, is feared by white-collar criminals and has a powerful deterrent effect," Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson said in a memo announcing the change.
Young said it has not been smart politics for Democrats or Republicans to push for more lenient sentences, particularly for violent crimes.
"No politician is going to say 'I'm for shorter sentences for people who have done violent things,"' he said.
The report's other findings:
-The incarceration rate, counting state and federal prisoners sentenced to more than one year, was 474 for every 100,000 U.S. residents, compared with 472 the year before. That means 1 in every 142 U.S. residents was in prison or jail in mid-2002.
-Jails supervised about 738,000 people in June 2002, compared with about 702,000 a year earlier. Many people in jails are awaiting trials or transfer to other facilities, while some serve short sentences there or are housed there because of state prison overcrowding.
-More than 72,400 jail inmates were supervised under programs such as drug treatment, electronic monitoring, community service or home detention.
-About 12 percent of all black males in the United States between the ages 20 and 39 were in prison or jail, by far the highest single group. In contrast, 4 percent of Hispanic males and 1.6 percent of white males in that age group were incarcerated.
-The number of women in federal and state prison topped 96,000, an increase of 1.9 percent from 2001. Men in these prisons totaled 1.3 million, up about 1.4 percent, and men also total about 88 percent of jail populations on a given day.
On the Net:
Bureau of Justice Statistics: [url=http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs]http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs[/url]
2003-04-07 10:26 | User Profile
Cheap labor for the NWO fascists:
[url=http://www.rtmark.com/busted/]Little Brother Gets Busted[/url]
2003-04-07 13:12 | User Profile
**The Color of Crime
The sensational crime study that proves:
* There is more black-on-white than black-on-black crime. * Blacks are statistically 50 times more likely to attack whites than vice versa. * Blacks are twice as likely as whites to commit hate crimes. * Blacks are as much more dangerous than whites as men are more dangerous than women. * And much more.
Read PDF: [url=http://www.amren.com/color.pdf]http://www.amren.com/color.pdf[/url]
Jared Taylor on "Crime" National Review, May 16, 1994
[url=http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/People/Taylor/taylor-natrev.html]http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Peop...lor-natrev.html[/url] **
New Nation Crime Pages:
[url=http://www.newnation.org/NNN-news-crime.html]http://www.newnation.org/NNN-news-crime.html[/url]
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**Black football player Rapes and kills White Girl
[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=5&t=7133]http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php...t=ST&f=5&t=7133[/url] **
**About 12 percent of all black males in the United States between the ages 20 and 39 were in prison or jail, by far the highest single group. **
2003-04-07 18:41 | User Profile
What I've always thought amusing is the way in which the "drug war" sends mostly blacks and Hispanics to prison. Yet complaints about the "racism" of drug laws fall on deaf political ears, unlike complaints about the "racism" of everything else. I think it all works out: violent and criminally inclined blacks and Hispanics belong in cages anyway, and it just so happens that "drugs" is a great catch-net for putting them there. The injustice to Whites is the high cost of the penal system, but I'm willing to pay it for now to stay safe. Three cheers for the drug laws!
2003-04-07 18:41 | User Profile
The prison population dropped in CA because the county jails and some state prisons are so short on funds they've been releasing the "lower risk" and non-violent offenders early, and in huge numbers.
2003-04-08 01:48 | User Profile
Originally posted by Hugh Lincoln@Apr 7 2003, 12:41 ** What I've always thought amusing is the way in which the "drug war" sends mostly blacks and Hispanics to prison. Yet complaints about the "racism" of drug laws fall on deaf political ears, unlike complaints about the "racism" of everything else. I think it all works out: violent and criminally inclined blacks and Hispanics belong in cages anyway, and it just so happens that "drugs" is a great catch-net for putting them there. The injustice to Whites is the high cost of the penal system, but I'm willing to pay it for now to stay safe. Three cheers for the drug laws! **
I strongly disagree. The Drug War is an absolute abomination, and those who enact and enforce drug laws are nothing but traitors to the Constitution.
First of all, adults have an absolute right to ingest whatever substances they want to as long as they're not hurting anyone else (as a pregnant woman would be). If I wanted to damage my health by doing drugs, then that would be my business and no one else's.
Second, Prohibition is the single greatest cause of violent crime in the nation. When the first Prohibition -- that of alcohol -- was repealed, the murder rate dropped by about half. Any time you outlaw something people want, you create an enormous potential for black market profits, and dealers are more than willing to fight each other over customers and turf. Dealers get filthy rich, police get bribed, and their opponents get killed. When a dealer is either killed by a rival or arrested, the Prohibition-inflated drug profits ensure that someone else will fill his place.
Third, because drug laws will never even make a dent in the supply or demand, frustrated lawmakers are continually enacting harsher and harsher laws to deal with those who insist on refusing government control over their own health. The result is overcrowded prisons and the early release of real criminals. This also ties in with the second point made above. Punishments for actual crimes, like murder, rape, and theft, are punished more lightly in order to keep enough room in the prisons for the drug users and their suppliers. That means more violent criminals on the streets. This government would rather "protect" us from pot smokers than from murderers and thieves.
Prohibition is absolutely impossible in a free country. If the soliders currently in Iraq want to really fight for freedom, they'll return to the US right away and waste all the DEA agents.