On Friday, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously to allow nearly 50,000 nonviolent federal drug offenders to seek lower sentences. The commission's decision retroactively applied an earlier change in sentencing guidelines to now cover roughly half of those serving federal drug sentences. Endorsed by both the Department of Justice and prison-reform advocates, the move is a significant step forward—though in a global context, still modest—in reversing decades of mass incarceration.
How large is America's prison problem? More than 2.4 million people are behind bars in the United States today, either awaiting trial or serving a sentence. That's more than the combined population of 15 states, all but three U.S. cities, and the U.S. armed forces. They're scattered throughout a constellation of 102 federal prisons, 1,719 state prisons, 2,259 juvenile facilities, 3,283 local jails, and many more military, immigration, territorial, and Indian Country facilities.
Compared to the rest of the world, these numbers are staggering. Here's how the United States' incarceration rate stacks up against those of other modern liberal democracies like Britain and Canada:
That graph is from a recent report by Prison Policy Initiative, an invaluable resource on mass incarceration. (PPI also has a disturbing graph comparing state incarceration rates with those of other countries around the world, which I highly recommend looking at here.) "Although our level of crime is comparable to those of other stable, internally secure, industrialized nations," the report says, "the United States has an incarceration rate far higher than any other country."
Some individual states like Louisiana contribute disproportionately, but no state is free from mass incarceration. Disturbingly, many states' prison populations outrank even those of dictatorships and illiberal democracies around the world. New York jails more people per capita than Rwanda, where tens of thousands await trial for their roles in the 1994 genocide. California, Illinois, and Ohio each have a higher incarceration rate than Cuba and Russia. Even Maine and Vermont imprison a greater share of people than Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Egypt...
Excerpt, read the entire article here.
Image credit: A Palestinian man holds his daughters, who were injured in an Israeli tank attack, as he leaves al-Shifa hospital, Gaza City (Getty Images).
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden argued that Al Qaeda was perfectly justified in killing all those people inside the World Trade Center because they weren't really civilians–they were complicit in U.S. might and misdeeds. Didn't their taxes fund America's CIA assassinations and war planes? As every American understood perfectly well at the time, the attack that day would not have been justified even if all office workers in the Twin Towers had voted for a president and supported a military that perpetrated grave sins in the Middle East. Or even, indeed, if they were all subletting spare bedrooms to U.S. soldiers.
Killing civilians is wrong, no matter how often those who do it insist that the humans they killed weren't really innocent. Everyone understands this truth when the civilians being killed are one's countrymen or allies–but forget it quickly when the civilians are citizens of a country one is fighting or rooting against in war, even though the civilizational taboo against killing civilians becomes no less important.
The latest to succumb to this seductive illogic, to insist that slain civilians weren't really civilians, is New York University's Thane Rosenbaum, who writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Gazans sheltered terrorists and their weapons in their homes, right beside ottoman sofas and dirty diapers. When Israel warned them of impending attacks, the inhabitants defiantly refused to leave. On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.
For purposes of this article, let's set aside all the adults killed in Gaza, just for the sake of argument. The dead Palestinian children are evidence enough that "real civilians" are being slaughtered. In the above passage, the author focuses on the dirty diapers rather than the baby that produced them. Elsewhere, he acknowledges the revolting number of kids killed in this conflict, and then adds, as if it's concession enough, "Surely there are civilians who have been killed in this conflict who have taken every step to distance themselves from this fast-moving war zone, and children whose parents are not card-carrying Hamas loyalists. These are the true innocents of Gaza." In fact, even a toddler whose father is a card-carrying Hamas loyalist is an innocent, by virtue of being a young child!
Except, read entire article here.
