[Peace-discuss] Land of the Unfree

[C. G. Estabrook]

Take rates of imprisonment. Here the US has the worst record of any rich country 
by far (the graph showing rates of imprisonment per 100,000 of population is the 
only one that has to be recorded on a log scale, because otherwise the US would 
be off the chart, even off the page).

But ... ‘there is a strong social gradient in imprisonment, with people of lower 
class, income and education much more likely to be sent to prison than people 
higher up the social scale.’ The US imprisons great swathes of its poor, black 
population ... even members of the white middle class are much more likely to be 
jailed in the US than they are in, say, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, Switzerland 
and Ireland (other countries on the graph).

Now it is almost certainly true that white middle-class Americans are more 
likely to be jailed than they would be elsewhere, simply because a system that 
is so hooked on incarceration at the bottom end of the scale is bound to suffer 
from a kind of ‘trickle-up’ effect. From a European perspective, it is still 
shocking to see the spectacular prison terms sometimes handed down to those Wall 
Street miscreants unlucky enough to find themselves before the courts...

[From a review posted to this list earlier today. --CGE]