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.

My explanation was not primarily economic though there was an economic component. The three groups I mentioned became Americans by violence and against their will. (To a degree, voluntary middle-class Americans of Hispanic or black origin relate differently to American life, though poor Mexican-American and Central-American Hispanic immigrants have about the same standing as, or worse than, poor American Hispanics whose families were conquered in he XIXc.)

Oh, and just to note in passing that if you turn the graph on its side (and reflect it), it’s very much a hockey-stick graph.

Also, eugenicist racism was and is subtly different from popular racism.

If I understand correctly, your model of racism in the US is primarily economic. In other words, in terms of labor (slavery) or land ( Indian and Mexican wars) racism was part of what helped one group ( the “whites”) to get stuff from the others ( the “blacks” and the “browns”) .

Seems roughly plausible but i’m not sure it captures all teh ups and downs in racism, particularly the racist association of African Americans with crime. This has hardly been a constant pattern from the slavery days to today. For example, is you look at the records of the Eugenics movement at Cold Springs harbor from the early 20th century, the negro was not at all the focus of degneracy – the Irish and the Eastern Europeans are the targeted groups.

Now again this could be a labor cost induced racism, but doesn’t seem explained by a grand “slavery and conquest” narrative.

I am using death due to assault as a proxy measure for violent crime that is relatively independent of level of enforcement or conviction. I can’t demonstrate the validity of that assumption, but I’ll assert that it is at least reasonable. Persons convicted of violent crimes account for almost half of the US prison population.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/corrtyp.htm

Very few incarcerations indeed are for murder.

Many crimes do not reduce liberty. Perhaps the crime rate can be lowered by locking lots of people up, and perhaps this is the best thing to do. But anyone who believes this must think that other values are as or more important than liberty, because she accepts a reduction in liberty in order to reduce crime (which very often does not reduce liberty itself). This seems to me to go against the principles of avowed libertarians, many of whom say, for example, that liberty must never be sacrificed for the sake of any other value. That’s why I put this question to Jet, but, unfortunately, never got a serious answer.

BTW my incidental claim that some libertarians think of liberty as a right held against the state may well be wrong and I happily withdraw it.

Once again, we see how liberals try to make America look bad, first by including “not exactly model states” and now by excluding data…

This correlation also suggests that the war on drugs which is often put forward as a cause of the high incarceration rate may have less of a direct effect than many believe.

The better question is: Why is the rate of violent crime so much higher in the US than in other countries? This question is often discussed, but general agreement has been difficult to achieve.

By contrast, the subjugation of the Welsh, the Scots, and the Bretons took place gradually over a period of centuries much longer ago, and as I understand many of the subjugated peoples were granted full participation once they accepted defeat.

On the other hand, Basque and Catalan autonomy in Spain, and Irish autonomy in Northern Ireland, still remain live issues.

In none of these cases is visible race a real factor. Americans are probably not more racist than others of W. European descent. (Look at the cases of the aborigines in Africa, or the Turks in Germany. The Turks are even white). But as it happens, whatever racism there originally was was exacerbated by the fact that our victims in the XIXc and before were mostly non-white.

The Chinese and Japanese cases are a good test. They are voluntary Americans, not victims of conquest, and while they suffered legal disabilities and savage violence at times, ultimately they became mostly accepted as Americans (as did Jews). There is still a lot of residual anti-Asian racism, but it’s much milder than racism against historical victims.

Anti-Indian racism is mild to nonexistent in many places, but becomes intense near reservations and in urban neighborhoods where Indians are common.

Also, I agree with you that all fundamental rights are negative. I also agree with the one who said that private property is a positive right, and thus not fundamental (yes, I suppose I am an anarchist, then). However, there’s nothing wrong with negotiated, and thus conditional rights, whether they be for right to health care or right to use of land. We only have to take care that they are well specified and don’t contradict each other.

Accepting the existance of “positive” rights has roughly the same effect on moral reasoning that allowing division by zero has in mathematics.

Yep; leads to the invention of L’Hospital (’s Rule), in which we treat both the upper and the lower (class). badoomp-ching.