...fewer guns will mean fewer murders, and that can only improve matters.

And another example of exactly what is described in the OP.

So that's a continent of evidence. Also, despite the claimed need of Americans to protect themselves with guns, no other Western nations seems to have a need for it. They have few or no guns and very few gun crimes. In fact, I think having so many is a self-reproducing cause for violence generally. Americans are taught to think of violence as a solution to problems, so they need guns. When you have a lot of hammers, everything looks like a nail, so they see violence as a solution.

..we have a higher per capita incarceration rate than did STALIN at the height of power.

instead of most likely dying a miserable death if you were in a gulag.

..in cleanliness. gulags were slave-camps for 'the people'. our prisons are slave-camps for corporations, except we have more slaves than stalin did. if 1/2 of the people died in gulags (i have no idea, just saying...) and less than an 1/8th die in ours, but we have four times as many people in prison .. well six of one half dozen of the other.

then there's the *scale* factor. if, scaled down for comparison, stalin murdered one man.. of how many counts of manslaughter are 'we the people' guilty?

either way, it's an ugly reality. it had to change with stalin, and for the same reasons, it has to change here.

when they needed to make room for more people. our system isn't good, with the amount of non violent (ie weed) offenders in jail, but it ranks about 5% on the true Gulag scale.

Or maybe there's some other explanation.

In 2007, around $74 billion was spent on corrections. The total number of inmates in 2007 in federal, state, and local lockups was 2,419,241. That comes to around $30,600 per inmate.

In 2005, it cost an average of $23,876 dollars per state prisoner. State prison spending varied widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana.

U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Not adjusted for inflation. To view the inflation-adjusted data:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States

But even if incarceration rates are true vs. other countries, that could mean that the U.S. is more vigilant about upholding its laws. It certainly has nothing to do with the longevity of prison terms, which is notoriously short, as we've seen by the repeat sexual assaults and murders by criminals who have been released.

It could also mean that some things are criminal here that are not criminal in other countries (some drugs).

It could also mean that we have more resources to catch criminals and solve crimes.

But what it does NOT mean is that the U.S. is infringing on individual freedom by putting criminals in prison.

I have found Aljazeera to be far less biased than the majority of US news media.

Are you saying that you actually believe that Americans might be more prone to criminal behavior than citizens of other countries?

I reject your premise that incarcerating people is not infringing on individual freedom. Of course it is infringing on the individuals freedom. Whether it is done so needlessly and unfairly is the point of the article and unless you surmise that Americans are far more dangerous when given freedom than citizens of other countries, I think the answer is a definitive. "yes."

It could also mean that the U.S. employs its prison system as a social program in lieu those that you'd find in other countries.

It could also mean that the U.S. uses mass incarceration as a continuation of our former system of slavery.

What's interesting is that, on one hand, you could postulate that other countries don't imprison as many people because we classify things as crimes that other countries don't, and yet on the other, you're casting doubt that the U.S. isn't specifically infringing on individual freedoms as we put those people into prison that we uniquely classify as prisoners.

Could that ACTUALLY mean that we're infringing on individual rights, compatible rights in countries that aren't being infringed upon, to fill our prisons? Not to mention the possibility that we may also be putting may innocent people in prison at rate higher than those other countries, could that also be the case as well?

Instead of using so much of our resources to imprison such a large percentage of our populace, wouldn't it be more practical and humane to use them to build a society that hasn't devolved into such a state as our so-called "criminality?"

America does impose longer sentences for relatively non-violent crimes, like B&E and the such… "Three Strikes," anybody? You don't see "Three Strikes" sentences anywhere other than the U.S., am I right?

One last this about how America holds up its laws: It seems to be more vigilant in upholding laws that imprison the poor and indigent than it does those with the means to fight back. Steal a few million dollars on Wall Street, you'd might get a nice, cushy country club prison for a few months, but be that poor slob who's caught with a few kilos of China White and you'd end up doing hard-hard time.

All laws AREN'T created equal, it seems.

You just happen to be walking down a New York street. Then out of the blue, just because you're there, a couple of New York's finest decides to stop, detain and frisk you.

You haven't committed any crime, you know this, and these cops also know that you're not a suspect of any crime. But simply because you're there, they decide to classify you as someone who's going to get stopped and frisked.

You protest and they respond with both verbal and physical abuse.

With your continued protests, they decide to step is up a notch and arrest you under a charge of "Disorderly Conduct" and "Assault on a Police Officer."

You're taken to jail, you remain there because you're poor and you can't afford bail. You can't afford a decent lawyer either, so instead of fighting the charges, an overworked public defender convinces you that your best choice is to plead guilty for a lesser sentence.

Now you have a record, which the cops will know that you have once you're invariably stopped again. If another set of cops decide to stop you and find some reason to arrest you, your record it going to make it harder for you.

And this all started because the police actively goes out in public and, self-admittedly, violates peoples' rights.

Yes, I'm say that it actually happens… And there are POLICE OFFICERS who agree with what I'm telling you:

That the US is the world leader in incarceration, both in absolute terms and per capita, is not controversial. You can check with the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice statistics for the annual reports. And there are various comparative indexes that show how our incarceration surpasses that of everyone else.

Our prison terms are not "notoriously short," but quite the opposite. Many industrialized countries have a 20-year MAXIMUM sentence; we hand out 20 years for some drug offenses, particularly if you're the wrong color. Western European crime rates are quite similar to ours (except for murder, go figger); the difference in incarceration rates is quite precisely because our sentences are so much longer.

We are imprisoning about 350,000 drug offenders right now. These are people whose most serious charge was a drug offense, so these are non-violent offenders. I think one could make a fairly strong argument that the US is "infringing on individual freedom" by imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people for victimless crimes.

You can make all the excuses you want, but the "land of the free" is the home of the gulag.

credibility when they allowed some influence from the West to infiltrate their reporting but the outcry at the obvious drop in standards from around the world, caused them to have to fire, or force the resignation of the culprit.

We do 'enforce our laws' more stringently as you say.

The problem is our 'laws'. Laws and sentencing often pushed by the For-Profit Prison Industrial Complex. Did you know they are on the Stock Exchange now?

We have one of the worst prison systems in the world, driven mostly by profit at this point. The more bodies the more money for the profiteers. The 'new slavery' as it is often referred to for some very obvious reasons.

We don't need Al Jazeera to tell us about it, anyone who has paid attention that is. Reagan's so-called 'tough on crime' nonsense, was the beginning of the Prisons-for-profit. It WAS clever I have to admit. Too bad we don't incarcerate the most dangerous of our criminals. Pot smokers, minorities, etc. fill up our prisons and use up vast amounts of law-enforcement resources which are then diverted from real crime.

Land of the Free where more people are in prison than any other country in the world, maybe even in history. USA! Numero Uno still, at least in some things.

Prison Industrial Complex..

where crime really pays...

and it's going to get worse. Soon prisons will be too big to fail. They will be such a huge part of the economy that to change the system will be detrimental to the jobs of millions of people. At the same time prison CEO's will be making huge salaries paid for by taxes, to keep all these bad people off the street. America is a scam. There are no jobs left they sent them overseas. It's work for McDonalds or join the military or just plain be poor and wait your turn in prison. Good futures are few and far between in this country and getting less.