slaves for sale.

[Papadoc]

Originally Posted by JohnScott

In order to defend America you are comparing it to dictatorships and the like? Why not compare it to Japan or England or Germany? Those countries do not incarcerate anywhere near the number/percentage that we do.

That would fall pretty much into the intellectually dishonest category, wouldn’t it John? Ferre based his entire premise on a comparison of the USA to the rest of the world, and specifically compared America to the USSR (which doesn’t exist, I might point out) and to China. Rules of honest debate would indicate that if someone makes their entire case on a comparison/analogy using faulty logic, you have the ability to attack the logic. It is not I that made the comparison to the entire world, I simply showed it for the one-dimensional logical formation that it is and gave examples.

And what’s this?… the only countries in the world worth considering are England, Germany, and Japan? Hmmm! Pulling the USA out too leaves you with about 92% of the rest of the world, doesn’t it? Not very cosmo of you John, though I can certainly see the advantage of only choosing data that you think help you make your point. If there was value in having a competition to see who could incarcerate the fewest citizens, then I would concede your argument. However, that makes Cuba the winner with the Mariel boatlift of 1980 when he emptied his prisons into the USA, and we can all just sit in awe of Castro’s low incarceration rate.

BTW, while Russia is not a democracy the way we think of it, neither is it a dictatorship. It is a federation with an elected president. That however, is a side issue. Just keeping the facts straight.

Regarding Ferre’s snide comments about the USA jailing foreign visitors, let’s compare: England (12.2% of their prison population are foreigners), Germany (29.9%), and Japan (7.7%) while the USA comes in #50 at 6.6%. An interesting point is that The Netherlands tops them all at 33.2%. Looks like THAT is the place to stay away from if you are a foreigner and want to stay out of jail.

Also interesting to note is that when it comes to pretrial detainees (percent of jail population being held without a trial), The Netherlands ties Papua New Guinea at 35.2%, Canada (28%), both well ahead of the USA (20%), Germany (19.7%), U.K (17%), and Japan (16.5%). Then of course there is prison over-population. Of note, Greece is slightly worse than Botswana at 158.3%, Italy (134.2%), France (117%), U.K. (109.7%), USA (108.5%), Japan (105.8%), Germany (99.9%), The Netherlands (97.5%). It looks like we all have about what we can handle.

There’s lots of ways to look at stats and they are irrelevant anyway. What IS important is the effect is has on crime. In the last decade, violent crime in the USA has dropped from 50/1000 to 23/1000. Crimes against property have dropped from 319/1000 to 163/1000. Compare this to other industrialized countries. Crime has recently hit record highs in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Toronto, and a host of other major cities. In a 2001 study, the British Home Office (the equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice) found violent and property crime increased in the late 1990s in every wealthy country except the United States. American property crime rates have been lower than those in Britain, Canada, and France since the early 1990s, and violent crime rates throughout the E.U., Australia, and Canada have recently begun to equal and even surpass those in the United States. Even Sweden, once the epitome of cosmopolitan socialist prosperity, now has a crime victimization rate 20 percent higher than the United States.

Tougher sentences mean longer jail time and higher populations. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics and its counterparts in other countries, a convicted armed robber can expect to serve about four and a half years behind bars in the United States, a little over two years in Great Britain, a bit less in Germany, and less than 18 months in France. No figures are available for Holland, but that’s probably because it’s hard to get away on your bike and they know this, and threatening someone with a wooden shoe doesn’t qualify as being armed. It could happen!

The European elite still seems to regard Americans' desire to lock up violent criminals as an index of barbarism and America as a nation gripped by violence and infatuated with rough, frontier justice. With violence and theft exploding all over the developed world, however, one has to ask which type of society is barbaric--one that punishes criminals, or one that lets them prey on law-abiding citizens? They let their prisoners run free and crime goes up. We lock them up and crime goes down. The math works.

So how about the rest of the world keep their criminal systems and we shall keep ours. In the meantime, I am all in favor of sending any or all of our poor abused criminals over to The Netherlands where they can enjoy all the freedoms that Ferre holds so dear. In fact, we just might want to see if Ferre has any open apartments on HIS block.