Sep 5, 2023

A Morally Unacceptable System of Criminal Justice in the United States Awaits the Overhaul of Public Education

As with all vexing social and political issues in the United States, the issues of crime and criminal justice will never be solved until we overhaul public education to create a more knowledgeable and more objectively analytical public. 

Our criminal justice system is driven by a crude understanding of psychology and by lives---  as lived by police, prosecutors, judges, juries, parole officers, and the general public---  that ensue in the absence of meaning and on the flimsy foundation of extraordinarily low knowledge bases.

We must revolutionize our systems of preK-12 public education if we are ever to address the core issues that give rise to criminal behavior and to the woeful ignorance observable in those key figures who operate the criminal justice system in the United States.

According to the Pew Research Center, summarized in a 16 August 2021 article by John Gramlich, World Prison Brief data estimates the U.S. incarceration rate at 639 inmates per 100,000 people as of 2018.  This is 13% higher than the rate of the next-closest country, El Salvador, which has an incarceration rate of 564 inmates per 100,000 people.  The U.S. rate substantially exceeds the rates of other nations with large populations:  Brazil has a rate of 357 inmates per 100,000 population, Turkey 335 inmates per 100,000 population.

Western European nations have rates of incarceration that are less than a quarter of the U.S. rate.  For England and Wales, the rate is 131 inmates per 100,000 population, in France 93 inmates per 100,000 population, and for Germany 69 inmates per 100,000 population.

The U.S. also leads the world in number of people detained in jails and in federal and state prisons;  the United States figure of 2 million jailed and imprisoned inmates is far higher than that of Brazil (about 760,000).

   Only China has a de facto higher incarceration rate:  The official figure is 1.7 million, but that sum does not include either the 650,000 people held in pre-trial detention nor the one million (1,000,000) Uyghurs who are detained in camps in the Xinjiang autonomous region;  these figures would bring the total or people incarcerated in China to 3.4 million.

This latter circumstance only underscores the disconnect between incarceration rates and actual crimes committed in the United States;  faint comfort is the status of the United States as the official world leader in rate of incarceration, with the only caveat being the de facto situation in the world’s most brutal regime.

Compare these figures pertinent to rate of incarceration to the crime rate in the United States, which increased to an all-time high in 1991 but then fell throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium >>>>>   

Perpend  >>>>>

From Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Crime in the United States, 1960-2004;  FBI Statistics, 20 March 2021

Violent Crime Rates (per 100,000 Population), 1960-2018

1960     >>>>>   160.8

1961     >>>>>   158.1

1962     >>>>>   162.3

1963     >>>>>    168.2

1964     >>>>>    190.6.

1965     >>>>>    200.2

1966     >>>>>    220.0

1967     >>>>>    253.2

1968     >>>>>    298.4

1969     >>>>>    328.7

1970     >>>>>    363.5

1971     >>>>>    396.0

1972     >>>>>    401.0

1973     >>>>>    417.4

1974     >>>>>    461.1

1975     >>>>>    487.8

1976     >>>>>    467.8

1977     >>>>>    475.9

1978     >>>>>    497.8

1979     >>>>>    548.9

1980     >>>>>    596.6

1981     >>>>>    594.3

1982     >>>>>    570.8

1983     >>>>>    537.7

1984     >>>>>    539.9

1985     >>>>>    556.6

1986     >>>>>    620.1

1987     >>>>>    612.5

1988     >>>>>    640.6

1989     >>>>>    666.9

1990      >>>>>   729.6

1991     >>>>>    758,2

1992     >>>>>    757.7

1993     >>>>>    747.1

1994     >>>>>    713.6

1995     >>>>>    684.5

1996     >>>>>    636.6

1997     >>>>>    611.0

1998     >>>>>    567.6

1999     >>>>>    523.0

2000     >>>>>    506.5

2001     >>>>>    504.5

2002     >>>>>    494.4

2003     >>>>>    475.8

2004     >>>>>    463.2

2005     >>>>>    469.0

2006     >>>>>    473.6

2007     >>>>>    471.8

2008     >>>>>    458.6

2009     >>>>>    431.9

2010     >>>>>    404.5

2011     >>>>>    387.1

2012     >>>>>    387.8

2013     >>>>>    369.1

2014     >>>>>    361.6

2015     >>>>>    373.7

2016     >>>>>    386.6

2017     >>>>>    383.8

2018     >>>>>    368.9

No comments:

Post a Comment