NEWS JUNKIE POST– America incarcerates more of it’s citizens than any other country in the world. With only 5% of the world population, America has more than 25% of the world’s prisoners.
America is either the country with the most criminals in the world,
the country that has become the greatest police state in the world, or
the country whom, with profit as the motive for all that is done, has
found a way to exploit it’ population through incarceration for
monetary gain.
The steep incline in the number of Americans incarcerated began in 1980. Since that time the number of Americans incarcerated has jumped from under 500,000 people to close to 2,500,000. The advent of private prisons during that time has created a powerful lobby, on behalf of its Wall Street investors, to lengthen sentences. Longer sentences means more prisoners. More prisoners means more prisons. More prisoners, and more prisons, means more profit. As a result, Americans now spend almost $70 billion a year on a corrections system (including prison, probation and parole) being run largely for profit.
A similar scheme by lobbyists has resulted in a system that exploits education, and has an equally negative affect on society. Lobbyists have repeatedly, and successfully, argued for the increase in financial aid to students. Rather than this assistance being passed on to students, privately run Universities have simply raised tuition.
“They are a business — higher ed must be a viewed as a business. Like any other business, what they are all about is making more money..,” states Dr. Marty Nemko, an advisor, career counselor, talk radio host, and prolific blogger, as quoted in the Daily Caller.
In addition to the exploitation of post-secondary school students, elementary and secondary students are hit particularly hard by systemic inequalities which promote self-perpetuating cycles of inadequate education and rising incarceration. As Steven Hawkins wrote in his article ‘Education vs Incarceration’ last month;
This trade-off between education and incarceration is particularly acute at the community level. In many urban neighborhoods where millions of dollars are spent to lock up residents, the education infrastructure is crippled. As the prison population skyrocketed in the past three decades, researchers began to notice that high concentrations of inmates were coming from a few select neighborhoods — primarily poor communities of color — in major cities. These were dubbed “million — dollar blocks” to reflect that spending on incarceration was the predominant public — sector investment in these neighborhoods. NAACP research shows that matching zip codes to high rates of incarceration also reveals where low-performing schools, as measured by math proficiency, tend to cluster. The lowest-performing schools tend to be in the areas where incarceration rates are the highest. The following [example is] instructive.
Continue reading about Incarceration Rates Going Up as Education Goes Down.
Photo by Flickr user Bob Jagendorf
© COPYRIGHT NEWS JUNKIE POST, 2011
To the great misfortune for our Great Nation: “Black Robe Disease” permeates our entire court system from our SCOTUS (Roberts, Scalia, his darker clone Clarence and Alito are prime examples) on down.
100 % of our lawyers and hardly any percent of regular people know this. Yet, Judicial Power is so concentrated police can put a gun to your head shoot you until dead and the Roberts/Scalia types will say “that’s fine.”
Our court system is destroying our country from within and cannot continue this way if we are to maintain our Great Nation’s place in the civilized world.
Guessing we have around 10,000 people in the “Judge” class (i.e. around 700 federal plus 9,000 or so state and local) who control over 300 million of us, I’d say: We The People are controlled efficiently and, relatively speaking, on the cheap. It will be tough to reform a system seemingly operating so well.
Yet, the awful down side of such concentrated power, infecting a huge percentage of the Judge class, is the horrific socially induced affliction euphemistically known as “Black Robe Disease,” AKA Judgeitis and Black Robe-itis. Here, and, directly attributable to Black Robe Disease, Judges with no compunction and complete impunity foist upon the American Public a prisoner class of people like never has anywhere in this world seen before.
Sans Black Robe Disease, no thinking feeling humans could treat so many other humans with such utter disregard for humanity.
Every lawyer, in fact, every person involved in the courtroom arena (save the Defendant, the Jurist and maybe the Judge) knows full well a vast majority of our Judge class citizenry is infected with the dreaded; yet, never mentioned, Black Robe Disease.
Until we can openly address and solve this problem, I doubt any reform of significance can be achieved. As long as the Judge class is constantly patronized by the entire judicial sub-culture the poor Judges can never escape the social bubble built around them. And, why should they want to escape? Life as a Judge is good and the socially bestowed Power creates real human chemistry that makes the Judge feel even better. With so much ego enhancing Power in the mix; it is fair to say Judges, most probably, cannot see the forest when such big tress are in the way; and, do not even recognize their own affliction.
This is where We The People can chime in loud and in no uncertain terms, dangerous as it may be: point out the horror of this “Black Robe Disease” blight on our judiciary; then, you will be headed in the right direction for meaningful reform.
Damn. Great post!