Imprisoned in the USA

I'm don't know why I get so behind with this blog, especially since I post on Twitter every day. Anyway, I'm back--with some words about prisons in the USA, especially in California.

Last Monday, a majority of five Supreme Court justices said that the overcrowding in California's prisons violates the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment. They ordered that the state's prison population be lowered by more than 30,000 inmates. (The order can be carried out in other ways besides early release. such as transfers out of state.)

The ruling talks about cages the size of a telephone booth, inadequate medical care, and a suicide rate 80 percent higher than the national prison average. (A California prisoner needlessly dies every six or seven days.)

That is California. But California has to be seen in the context of the whole country. The USA imprisons more people than any other country in the world. Here are some numbers per 100,000, as of 2009:

USA: 743
Russia: 577
China: 120
Canada: 117

We are five percent of the world's population, but we hold 25 percent of all the inmates in the world.

About one in 32 Americans is in prison, on probation or on parole.

US taxpayers dish out $60 billion a year for prisons.

Civil rights lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander reports that the USA "imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the hight of apartheid."

So what is behind this colossal mess?

Mandatory sentences. Longer sentences than anywhere else in the world. And the so-called War On Drugs.

You can add your name to the hundreds of thousands of people who want to end this useless drug war. Just paste this link into your browser:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/end_the_war_on_drugs_c/?twi

Let's get out right now

Polls show that at least two-thirds of Americans want to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

With Osama Bin Laden out of the picture, President Obama now has a unique opportunity to end the Afghanistan fiasco, our longest war ever. Official reason given to invade that country: the Taliban -- originally supported, of course, by the US against the Soviets -- would not hand over Bin Laden to the US. (They probably would have handed him over to another Muslim country.)

If we stop focusing on the question of seeing photos of Bin Laden's body, we can face the dreadful music:

* Coalition military deaths in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 now number 4,770. 4,452 of these are US deaths.

* Coalition military deaths in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2011 now number 2,444. 1,570 of these are US deaths.

* The official number of US troops wounded in Iraq is 33,023. Antiwar.com estimates the number to be over 100,000.

* It is a daunting task to try to find out the number of US troops seriously wounded in Afghanistan, but one conservative estimate is 3,420.

* Documented Iraqi civilian deaths from violence are somewhere between 100,693 and 109,990 -- with perhaps 15,000 more from the Wikileaks' Iraq War Logs.

* There are more US mercenaries, 100,00 of them, in Afghanistan and Iraq than US troops.

* It has long been known that Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, if not the worst. Now Wikileaks has uncovered cables from the US embassy in Kabul that say the scale of Afghan government corruption is "overwhelming" with regard to bribery, money laundering and profiting from the drug trade.

* Iraq is almost as bad. In 2010, the watchdog group Transparency International listed Iraq as the fourth most corrupt country in the world, after Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar) and Somalia.

With the removal of Osama Bin Laden, this moment is one that President Obama cannot miss. History will be very hard on a failure to act now and get out.