Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

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> An intellectually rigorous system would, for example, study in great detail the connection between hundreds of billions of dollars in financial fraud and tax evasion and millions of easily preventable deaths, not dramatically reduce every year the resources devoted to fighting crime committed by the wealthy.

I'm glad when they said how over-policed some areas are that they also pointed out how we don't police other areas at all and the effect of those other areas, like white-collar crime, are HUGE.

The article stressed injustices based on race and geography. It touched less on differences of injustices based on class. I don't think it mentioned sex at all. Since I applied to volunteer with the Innocence Project -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_Project -- I've become much more aware of how what we all know, which is how much more men are targeted and jailed.

I volunteered because after seeing a documentary on the project I felt compelled to do something. The innocent people the project freed spent an average of 13.5 years in jail -- completely 100% innocent. My taxes are paying for the system this piece described.

You can do something to change the system too.

Edit: a quick search for the question below on differences in sex for the same crimes -- "Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002, which I found in "Men Sentenced To Longer Prison Terms Than Women For Same Crimes, Study Says" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/men-women-prison-se..., which has links to other research too.

But guys, nothing is ever 100% one way or the other, no matter how much you support it. So you have to look at differing points of view -- unless the objective is just to have a good rant.

Here are the things that come to mind reading this:

- Yep, highest incarceration rates ever. Also violent crime has been dropping to unheard-of lows and the country is safer than it ever has been

- Prisons are not about justice or reform. [insert really long discussion here]. Political systems exist and function for political reasons. Therefore the prison system is made and maintained to keep society together. They don't put the guy who killed you friend in the electric chair because of justice. They do it so you don't kill him yourself, or have a lifelong vendetta against both him and the system.

- This piece is written by a lawyer. Do not expect it to fairly talk about all of the options. It's invective; well-written, emotional, powerful invective. The goal is to make you turn off your brain and feel a certain way. Treat it as such.

- Although this is targeted at lawyers, whatever failings there are? Most likely a result of judges and elected officials -- in other words, the public. If the public wants something, and it wanted harsher sentencing, it gets it. That means changes need to occur with the electorate, not elite legal minds

- If the system is broken, it's broken. Toss out all of that racism stuff, it's a red herring. People shouldn't have their civil rights abused because it's the wrong way to run a country, not because they're a member of an oppressed minority. If you want to win this fight and fix things, toss out every other issue aside from fixing the system. Sure, use various things like incarceration rates among blacks as an argument, but only very carefully. If this is a true problem affecting everybody (and I believe it is), then don't attach yourself to one particular cause or the other. That's just an easy way to lose the discussion.

We desperately need to fix things, but that's only going to happen if we make both impassioned and dispassionate arguments -- and only if we understand the terms at stake. I'm not sure this article helped any, but it damned sure made me angry at how broken things are.

In the United States, there are 487,000 incarcerated awaiting trial [1].

[1] http://www.americasquarterly.org/aborn-prisons