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Liberty Weeps over Ferguson and New York

Liberty Weeps over Ferguson and New York

LibertyWeeps

Last night’s decision over Eric Garner in New York after what happened in Ferguson has left the United States in more turmoil than the nation has experienced in years, maybe even decades. I tossed and turned much of the night, unable to sleep, angry and sad.  Liberty, what I hold most dear, weeps.

 

Much will be said about this over the coming years, but I believe it comes down to this. In order for people to respect the law, both the laws and those who uphold them must be respectable.

 

The law in the US is no longer worthy of respect, having criminalized human behavior to an insane degree and those who are to uphold the law have turned into a militarized force that is entirely too focused on intimidation and domination rather than “to protect and serve;” obviously this is not true for every person involved in enforcement. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post (here), no other country incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than the United States, a dubious gold medal we’ve held since 2002. Over 7 people are incarcerated out of every 1,000. The US has about 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the entire world’s prison population!

 

While I understand the pain and frustration, the violent protests and broad accusations of racism detract from the very real issues and often harm the credibility of those accusations raises questions over their validity. We do have very real problems in the US, and it seems to me they have reached a point at which they can no longer be ignored, but history has shown that these are best resolved by principled dialogue. The US was founded on deep respect for individual rights and a passionate desire to limit the power of the government. Respect for an enforcement of individual rights by definition prohibits any racism in the law. Individuals are still free to be bigoted jerks, but no law can fix that. Only a just society can provide fertile ground for enlightenment of the ass.

 

As a nation we’ve stumbled along and not gotten things right many times, but the trajectory was at least in the right direction. We used to have credibility in our role as the global defender of liberty! We used to be a nation that fought for what was right and we weren’t so easily scared, so willing to give up responsibility for the empty promise of security. Fear has led to an increasingly militarized police force and a mind boggling expansion of what is deemed “criminal,” which has placed this insane, perverse, over-arching enforcement of “law” above basic human respect. It needs to stop, but if any nation on earth is capable of reversing this horrible course, it is America.  She can once again become the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Prison, it’s not the perks, it’s the population: An over-criminalization crisis

Prison, it’s not the perks, it’s the population: An over-criminalization crisis

The headlines this week have been touting how “Prison life has never been so good,” here and here. While I understand why taxpayers would be none too pleased at the idea that prisoners enjoy more daily life perks than those out earning a living every day, it isn’t the perks that are the problem. It is the massive prison population that ought to make you hopping mad.

The US has a wildly unproductive criminal justice system with a self-destructive focus on revenge-oriented judgment and entirely too many laws that permanently damage an individual’s potential for committing acts that ought never to have been considered a crime in the first place.  We have a veritable over-criminalization crisis.

No other country incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than the United States, a dubious gold medal we’ve held since 2002. Over 7 people are incarcerated out of every 1,000. The US has about 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the entire world’s prison population!

U.S. prison population is over 2.4m and has quadrupled since 1980, with the largest driver of this change being longer prison sentences for drug offenders. There is something seriously wrong with a system in which had the current President been caught smoking pot, as he admits he did in his youth, he could have been sent to prison and been unable to ever make much of his life, after being saddled with the stigma of a convict. Instead, he was one of the lucky ones who never got caught and is now arguably the most powerful person on earth. Something is very wrong with a system that would have imprisoned and effectively ruined his life, as it has so many others, even if you disagree with his political views!

Bottom Line: Prisons ought to be reserved exclusively for those who are a physical threat to society, not as a taxpayer funded form of revenge. Those who are not a physical danger to society ought to remain productive members of society and atone for their misdeeds while being an active part of the economy.