WHY DO WE keep calling it ''the war on drugs?'' It's not a war when you lose every battle; it's a rout. Why do we think we're winning ''the war on crime'' when 600,000 inmates return to our streets every year, their behavior ''modified'' by whatever they encountered behind bars? The lock-'em-up theory of criminal justice is criminal, but it's not justice when we confine tens of thousands of poorly educated, generally low-IQ individuals for nonviolent offenses that hurt themselves more than anyone else. [continues 766 words]
Small, Poor, Remote Country History of political instability. Rich people still screwing over poor people as they've done from the Year One. Decades-old guerrilla war that began with machetes and shotguns now escalating to big-time weapons. US government sends money. Political advisers. Military advisers. More money. Now it's two kinds of military helicopters. Haven't we seen this movie before? The Americanization of Colombia's civil-drug war looks and smells like Vietnam all over again. Twenty-five years after Saigon fell like a rotting plum from the grasp of Uncle Sam and the corrupt and incompetent South Vietnamese regime, we're trying the same dumb thing all over again. [continues 841 words]
Small, Poor, Remote Country History of political instability. Rich people still screwing over poor people as they've done from the Year One. Decades-old guerrilla war that began with machetes and shotguns now escalating to big-time weapons. US government sends money. Political advisers. Military advisers. More money. Now it's two kinds of military helicopters. Haven't we seen this movie before? The Americanization of Colombia's civil-drug war looks and smells like Vietnam all over again. Twenty-five years after Saigon fell like a rotting plum from the grasp of Uncle Sam and the corrupt and incompetent South Vietnamese regime, we're trying the same dumb thing all over again. [continues 840 words]
Paul Guidel, who was 17 when he committed second-degree murder, lived in a Fishkill, N.Y., prison cell for 68 years, eight months, and two days before being released at age 85. He holds the record for the man imprisoned longest in the United States. He made the Guinness Book of Records. You can look it up. But he has lots of company. The numbers are out again, and the totals are eye-popping: At the rate we're going, we'll have just under 2 million Americans behind bars by the end of 1999. Happy New Year. As of last June, the government counted 1.8 million, an all-time high. And that's not counting the hundreds of thousands of Americans paid to guard, feed, house, inoculate, and otherwise fuss over them. Only Russia imprisons citizens at a higher rate, among the, ahem, advanced countries. [continues 752 words]
If I told you that my prescription for making America a bit safer from crime was to lock up every blessed soul living in Maine and New Hampshire, you'd think I was nutty. But official government policy in this country has almost that many people behind bars this morning, more than 1.7 million. And if you throw in all the employees who report to prison or jail every day, the guards, cooks, nurses and administrators, the total of Americans who spend their day inside prison walls is more than the combined populations of Maine and New Hampshire. [continues 792 words]
If I told you that my prescription for making America a bit safer from crime was to lock up every blessed soul living in Maine and New Hampshire, you'd think I was nutty. But official government policy in this country has almost that many people behind bars this morning, more than 1.7 million. And if you throw in all the employees who report to prison or jail every day, the guards, cooks, nurses, and administrators, the total of Americans who spend their day inside prison walls is more than the combined populations of Maine and New Hampshire. Now for more news: The prison and jail population will probably top 2 million in time for 2000. Sure, crime rates are falling, but prison and jail populations are rising. How so? Longer sentences. Since Ronald Reagan's tough talk on crime proved politically popular in the mid-'80s, your typical inmate has had five months tacked on to his time in the jug, from an average of 20 months to 25 months. [continues 707 words]
