Self examination

With the shock of the pair of recent hurricanes, the racist comments by Bennett, and other events which have brought the current state of affairs in America to light, I figured maybe we'd better take an honest look at how we got here. We can't fix it without that honest look.

This nation isn't what most of us think it is, and one of the most disappointing things I see is the tendency to say we aren't tough enough, that we need to be more "law and order", or such like that in order to succeed as a party. The law of unintended consequences is alive and well, and before we go any farther we'd batter take a real look at what we've accomplished so far.

The United States is in terms of our own people the single most imprisoned nation in the world, bar none. After the breakup of the Soviet Union they instituted reforms as we kept locking them up, we passed them years ago.

The info in the following document is a year or so out of date but is still useful for international comparisons.

Comparative International Rates of Incarceration
http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/pub9036.pdf

More recent stats can be found at the following page, I'll include some highlights from there to show where the US actually stands as of the most recent stats I've seen published.

PrisonSucks.com: Research on the prison industrial complex
http://www.prisonsucks.com/

U.S. incarceration rates by race, June 30, 2004:

* Whites: 393 per 100,000
* Latinos: 957 per 100,000
* Blacks: 2,531 per 100,000

Gender is an important "filter" on the who goes to prison or jail, June 30, 2004:

* Females: 123 per 100,000
* Males: 1,348 per 100,000

Look at just the males by race, and the incarceration rates become even more frightening, June 30, 2004:

* White males: 717 per 100,000
* Latino males: 1,717 per 100,000
* Black males: 4,919 per 100,000

If you look at males aged 25-29 and by race, you can see what is going on even clearer, June 30, 2004:

* For White males ages 25-29: 1,666 per 100,000.
* For Latino males ages 25-29: 3,606 per 100,000.
* For Black males ages 25-29: 12,603 per 100,000. (That's 12.6% of Black men in their late 20s.)

Or you can make some international comparisons:
South Africa under Apartheid was internationally condemned as a racist society.

* South Africa under apartheid (1993), Black males: 851 per 100,000
* U.S. under George Bush (2004), Black males: 4,919 per 100,000

What does it mean that the leader of the "free world" locks up its Black males at a rate 5.8 times higher than the most openly racist country in the world?

The driving force behind this seems to be the drug war, and the really pathetic thing is that by most measures our policies have actually increased the damage sustained by drug use. Drugs with no doubt can be dangerous and some are in any case I can think of, but if our "cure" is worse than the damage they caused to start with then what in the world are we doing? Death rates are up, use has hardly moved in a decade or two, purity is up at the street level and prices adjusted for inflation are down.

Drug death trends
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/death/drug-death.htm
Drug use trends
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/nsduh/nsduh.htm
Drug prices
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/fed-data/prices.htm
Drug purity
http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/fed-data/purity.htm

As a bonus those locked up are deprived of their right to vote so reduce representation in the neighborhoods they are from and are going to be released to, but they *are* counted in the census of the cities and counties their prison is located in so help to increase the representation of their jailers.

Prisoners of the Census
http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/

We've failed on every level, increased the damage each time we've increased our efforts, and all anyone has to do is attach the "war on drugs" tag to almost any abuse and we're afraid to speak against it. The results it seems don't matter so much as how the idea makes us feel. No, we don't need to accept or ignore drugs, but it's about time to get off the "get tough" kick, isn't it?

How can we have been a part of building this system for the last couple of decades, then act so shocked at the results we've created? What we've seen recently is just the inescapable result of building a nation that can create the stats listed above. They've been there all along, right there in the US Governments stats for anyone who cared to look. More of us should care.

roughly doubles the incarceration rates for *all* races, compared to incarceration rates by race alone.

Just an observation, unless I'm missing something (Just woke up). It doesn't take away from the meat of your research.

The overall rate as of June 30 2004 was 726 per 100,000 which was up from the 702 per 100,000 listed in the June 2003 document listed above it.

Just for general interest, the average rate of nations comparable to us runs closer to somewhere between 100 and 150 per 100,000. That documented in the Sentencing Project document.

There's no reason for people to be buying pot from meth and heroin dealers. It just exposes them to risk of involvement with other drugs and the criminal element. Been saying it for ages.