But then we wouldn’t enjoy the bloodlust, crappy legal representation, phony phorensic labs with liars giving expert testimony and false convictions.

The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the prison population, or more than 2 million of eight million imprisoned worldwide.

About 1,222,000 of 1,983,000 incarcerated in 2000 are nonviolent, or 61.6%, not exactly a winning argument for the idea we are protecting society from the “worst” offenders.
(see:http://www.cjcj.org/pubs/punishing/punishing.html)

Remember also, many crimes defined as violent, may be bar fights, domestic disputes and DUI collisions—bad events perhaps, but not necessarily the work of career criminals.

An entrenched corrections industry, replete with glitzy Las Vegas conventions and lobbyists are a driving force in criminal justice expenditures and policy, if you can call lining your pockets a policy. And the conviction-driven prosecutors armed with mandatory sentencing who have taken judicial discretion away from the courts.
(see: Paul Craig Roberts, Presumed guilty, http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts12212005.html)

Releasing millions of americans back into their communities (96% of all prisoners are released), saddled with lifelong “felonies” that bar them from meaningful employment, six million children living as orphans of the prison boom, should not nake any of us feel safer.

Tonight on one of those interminable “cop” shows, I watched Las Vegas police incarcerate a women for stealing two packages of steak. She had a six month old child in the car, and they made clear the child would be placed in state custody, and probably into the foster care system, since she had no relatives to care for it. They had no choice either.

That should really work out well. Nice use of public resources.

Or maybe I’m not seeing this way the Engles way and next you’ll point to Somalia with no penal system and tell me how they are the best in the world at securing liberty?

But to return to the actual topic of the thread it’s irrelevant (and in bad taste) for you to start screaming about child rapists. The US, in case you hadn’t noticed, does worse than every other country on the list. Perhaps you didn’t know: other developed countries jail rapists. Or, at least, they do as good a job of doing it as the US.

So I’ll ask you again: do you not think that, for someone who professes to care about liberty, and to dislike government coercion, the number of people whom the state deprives of their liberty, for whatever reason, might be a matter of concern in itself? And if you don’t think so, are you sure that it is really liberty that you care about?

This thread is a joke so of course I’m going to have some fun.

But on a more serious note Hell is a real place for a lot of South Africans. Stop and think about that shit for a while and see if it doesn’t mess with you.

But seriously, Jet, are South African children really “more likely to be raped than to go to school”?

Yes, American citizens are, on average, more likely to be unfree then Danish citizens, but it is their own fault? It doesn’t sound very patriotic.

And, no, I didn’t make a stupid overall comparison between the US and South Africa. And I am not calling for criminals to be freed. I am pointing out that their loss of freedom is still a loss of freedom.

If you want to discuss causes of crime, that might be more enlightening. Asking why the US has such high levels of crime is a thought worth pursuing. Of course in the context of Kieren’s dandy little chart that would lead to questions of why does South Africa have such high levels of crime to make the US look like Denmark, yet let those criminals walk the streets preying upon innocents. I have a terrible, yet nagging feeling that in Engles’ world, criminals shouldn’t be punished, only the victim and society should be blamed for forcing the criminal into his crimes.

But saying the US is worse than South Africa because the US denies child rapists their freedom is a non starter for everyone except possibly you.