Harsh American "Justice"

"Justice" is harsher and more people find themselves behind bars in America than any other wealthy country. As a percentage of population, the United States imprisons five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany, and and whopping 12 times more than Germany. Why is this? For starters, sentences are too harsh, too many actions are deemed criminal that should be legal, and laws on the books are so vague that it is difficult for the average citizen to even know if they've broken the law.

To learn about our flawed legal system, read the article in The Economist, "To many laws, too many prisoners." The specific examples will stun you. This article also explains how we got to where we are:

"In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100. Since then, the voters, alarmed at a surge in violent crime, have demanded fiercer sentences. Politicians have obliged. New laws have removed from judges much of their discretion to set a sentence that takes full account of the circumstances of the offence. Since no politician wants to be tarred as soft on crime, such laws, mandating minimum sentences, are seldom softened. On the contrary, they tend to get harder.

Some criminals belong behind bars. When a habitual rapist is locked up, the streets are safer. But the same is not necessarily true of petty drug-dealers, whose incarceration creates a vacancy for someone else to fill, argues Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University. The number of drug offenders in federal and state lock-ups has increased 13-fold since 1980. Some are scary thugs; many are not."