Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Inmate Count in US Dwarfs Other Nations

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)


The New York Times

2 comments:

fchristie said...

Crime and punishment are symptomatic of society’s inability to address the cause of the unhappiness and lack of fulfillment that generates these conditions.
Instead of looking to social, penal, psychological or political solutions to problems, perhaps we should look inward and work on correcting ourselves out of our egoism.
We are all in this together and it can be said, in a sense, that all the world’s pain resides in us.

Michael Laitman states this more succinctly. http://www.laitman.com/2008/05/all-the-worlds-pains-are-in-one-country/

Anonymous said...

酒店經紀,酒店小姐,酒店公關,酒店打工,酒店上班,禮服店,便服店,假日打工,酒店兼差,酒店兼職,暑假打工,寒假打工,酒店經紀爆米花,酒店打工爆米花,酒店兼差爆米花,酒店兼職爆米花,酒店上班爆米花,酒店工作爆米花,酒店小姐爆米花,禮服店爆米花,假日打工爆米花,酒店經紀PRETTY GIRL,酒店上班PRETTY GIRL,酒店兼差PRETTY GIRL,酒店工作PRETTY GIRL,酒店打工PRETTY GIRL


酒店
童裝批發
童裝批發
童裝
童裝
酒店喝酒
暑假打工
酒店
酒店經紀人
酒店小姐
酒店兼職
酒店上班
酒店兼差
禮服店
酒店上班
酒店打工
酒店小姐
酒店經紀
假日打工
台北酒店經紀
酒店應酬
粉味
茵悅
酒店經紀
酒店經紀