Monday, July 11, 2011

hanging on by a hair


Sister is in California staying in a hotel. I just realized how different we are. Hotel hopping is not something I want to do ever. I like home.
She is on the third floor and while looking out the window she spotted two males coming out the back door of a restaurant, they were smoking a pipe then Sister calls 911 and the cops came and threw the fellows in the hoosegow. No doubt the pipe contained Marijuana.
I would never have called the cops. I think live and let live is best unless the person you are spying on is doing real harm to someone else.

US prison population at a glance
The “war on terror” is endlessly peddled by the American political establishment as a crusade for freedom and liberty around the world. Yet, as the latest prison figures again demonstrate, far from representing freedom, justice and democracy, the United States is notorious for its propensity to jail its own population.

The US incarcerates a far higher percentage of its population than any other country, with its prison population accounting for fully a quarter of the world’s prisoners. In 2006, newly released Census Bureau data indicate, the US incarcerated population stood at 2.1 million. According to separate figures put out by the Justice Department, by June 30, 2006, the prison population stood at well over 2.2 million.

No other country in the world comes close to these numbers. The far more populous China ranks second, with a prison population of approximately 1.5 million. The number of incarcerated persons in the US now exceeds the population of all but three cities in the country, and is equivalent to the combined populations of Seattle, Boston, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

The number of inmates held in US state and federal prisons in 2006 was more than double the 1990 prison population, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The research and advocacy group The Sentencing Project estimates that in 2006, one in every 133 Americans was in prison or jail. Excluding the child population from the total brings this ratio close to one in every 100 adults behind bars.

Minorities continue to make up an enormously disproportionate percentage of the incarcerated. Approximately 41 percent of the adult correctional population were black in 2006, and 19 percent were Hispanic. One in every nine black men between the ages of 25 and 29 were incarcerated in 2006, as were one in 26 Hispanic and one in 59 white men of the same age group. According to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, black men have a one in three chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic men have a 17 percent chance; white men have a 6 percent chance.

2 comments:

Donna. W said...

If we knew how many people smoke pot, including people our ages, we'd faint from shock. Personally, I think they should legalize it so it could be taxed, but that's just me.

Galla Creek said...

As you....I would have just went back inside my room. Our Sister is a do gooder! ha.