Pubdate: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 Source: Canberra Times (Australia) Copyright: 2000 Canberra Times Contact: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/ IT'S POLITICAL IF U.S. JAILS 1.9 MILLION THERE are now 1,860,520 people in jail in the land of the free, the United States. It means that the US has more people in jail than any country on earth. This figure was revealed by the US Justice Department. It has more people in jail than China, yet China has more than four times the population of the US. China has about 1.2 million people in jail. The US has more people in jail than Russia, which has about a million people in jail. The US has more people in jail per head of population than any country on earth. It has 5 per cent of its population in jail and 20 per cent of the world's prison population. Bear in mind that Russia is the child of the Soviet Union, the place US President Ronald Reagan called the Evil Empire. Bear in mind that the US periodically tries to get China condemned in the United Nations for breaches of human rights. But we must ask why all these people are in jail. In China and places like Saudi Arabia and a dozen or so African countries, many people are in jail for political dissent. In the US, all the prisoners are common criminals. They have committed crimes against the person or property. Political dissent is tolerated at least up to a point. There is no long jail term for political dissent, though you might spend a weekend in jail if you are caught up in a demonstration against the International Monetary Fund in Washington. But is the US so lawless and are the people so under siege by crime that it is necessary to have so many people in jail? Perhaps it is worth looking beyond the offences for which the 1.9 million people have been convicted. The number of people in jail in the US and the length of time they are in there is, in fact, a direct cause of political policy rather than any sensible need for justice, deterrence or rehabilitation. Looking at typical sentences in western democracies for various crimes, the US figure is much higher. The reason is that US politicians allow themselves to be swayed by irrational calls from their voters for longer sentences. So how can one describe the balance of the sentence served in the US that goes beyond typical sentences in the rest of the world other than as years spent in jail for political reasons? It is the blacks, moreover, who suffer the heaviest sentences. Nothing is stated in the law but that is how it ends up in practice. Mandatory sentencing has also swollen US prisons. Many US states have mandatory sentencing laws that make the Northern Territory's look like a model of liberalism. In California, a minor third offence can result in 25 years without parole. Moreover, with discretion moved to prosecutors and police, blacks are bearing the burden. The political imperative to impose and not commute death sentences is also a cause of human-rights concern. It is surprising that UN human rights bodies have so little to say about the US and so much to say about Australia. A large factor in the high US imprisonment rate is the prohibition policy with respect to drugs. A high proportion of those in jails are there for possession of drugs or for crimes committed in the pursuit of money to obtain drugs. Once again, politics is a major reason for the strict prohibition policy and for the policy that imposes draconian sentences for drug offences. In a sense, the drug prisoners are political prisoners, too, once they have served what would, in other western democracies, be considered the norm. The US constitutional guarantees of civil liberty are fine in theory, but they are not working in practice. - --- MAP posted-by: Greg