We are NUMBER ONE! Yes, who would have thought that 'the land of the free' is also the world champion for incarcerating its people?

A new report by Pew's Public Safety Performance Project details how, for the first time in history, more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison-a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety.

We now imprison more people for drug law violations than all of Western Europe, with a much larger population, incarcerates for all offences. Drug offenders are clogging the U.S. justice system. Mandatory sentencing laws and the record number of nonviolent drug offenders is costing taxpayers billions of dollars every year, with no relief in sight

A close examination of the most recent U.S. Department of Justice data (2006) found that while one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, the figure is one in nine for black males in that age group. Men are still roughly 13 times more likely to be incarcerated, but the female population is expanding at a far brisker pace. For black women in their mid- to late-30s, the incarceration rate also has hit the one-in-100 mark. In addition, one in every 53 adults in their 20s is behind bars; the rate for those over 55 is one in 837.

That statistic masks far higher incarceration rates by race, age and gender. A separate analysis of midyear 2006 data from the U.S. Department of Justice shows that for Hispanic and black men, for instance, imprisonment is far more prevalent.

"The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in locking up our fellow citizens," said Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports alternatives in the war on drugs.

From The Human Rights Watch Website:

Federal crack cocaine offenders face criminal sentences that are uniquely severe compared to those imposed on other federal drug offenders. The current sentencing structure for cocaine offenses imposes five- and ten-year mandatory minimum sentences for threshold quantities of cocaine. Under what is commonly referred to as the "100-to-1" cocaine sentencing disparity, it takes one hundred times as much powder cocaine as crack cocaine to trigger the federal mandatory minimums. By virtue of the 100-to-1 differential, sentences for crack offenders are far higher than those for powder cocaine offenders who engage in equivalent conduct. Crack cocaine is also the only drug whose simple possession triggers a mandatory prison sentence for first-time offenders.

African Americans bear the brunt of the uniquely severe sentences meted out to crack offenders under the federal sentencing laws. Although available evidence indicates there are more white cocaine offenders than black, data from the United States Sentencing Commission reveal that in 2000, over 84 percent of federal crack defendants were African American, a proportion that did not vary significantly throughout the 1990s.

The racially disproportionate nature of the crack/powder sentencing differential is inconsistent with the United States' obligation to comply with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), a treaty ratified by the United States in 1994.2 ICERD requires states parties "to prohibit and to eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race, … to equality before the law," including "the right to equal treatment before the tribunals and all other organs administering justice."

Human Rights Watch. Cracked Justice: Addressing the Unfairness in Cocaine Sentencing.

Year by year, corrections budgets are consuming an ever larger chunk of state general funds, leaving less and less in the pot for other needs. Collectively, correctional agencies now consume 6.8 percent of state general funds, 2007 data show. That means one in every 15 dollars in the states' main pool of discretionary money goes to corrections. Considering all types of funds, corrections had the second fastest rate of growth in FY 2006.

With one in 100 adults looking out at this country from behind an expensive wall of bars, the need for revision of our crime and punishment system cannot be ignored.

There are some interesting correlations between the price of gas at the pumps and the profits the oil companies are making. If the price of oil is so high, and the price of gasoline is so high, how can these companies be breaking every profit record in the books?

"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
- Constitution of the United States : Preamble -

Joseph E. Duncan III was 16 at the time he was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of raping a 14-year-old boy in Tacoma, Washington at gunpoint. I am sure you have read, watched on TV, and heard on the radio the shocking story of his arrest as a suspect for murder, kidnapping, and child molestation.

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