Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Land of the Free?
According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College in London, the United States has long had the world's largest prison population, followed by China at 1.5 million and Russia at 885,670.
What on earth are we doing wrong? This weekend there were 3 or 4 shootings and a couple of murders in my town. Just south of here last week there was a shooting that involved something like a dozen people. Last week near Detroit some guy stole a woman's necklace and sank her in a nearby lake. Some cop (hopefully ex-cop) in Ohio is accused of murdering his pregnant girlfriend, and a pro-wrestler seems to have killed his wife, his kid and belatedly himself.
And that is with more people in prison than any other country in the world. I don't get it. Who the hell do we have locked up? Do we put some guy in the slammer for smoking some crack while the murderers and rapists wander the streets? Something has gone or is going seriously wrong in the good ol' USofA and it worries me. We have 2,193,798 people (that's about 1 per 137 people) behind bars and it doesn't seem to be helping a whole lot. There is a problem here and I'm absolutely clueless of what can be done about it.
Labels: crime, freedom, government
