No it’s not. The average Filipino has to deal with considerably less bullshit on a day-to-day basis than an American. (Marcos did that country a big, fat favor by draining the treasury to bare rocks; the succeeding government thus didn’t have the cash for funding all those sorts of programs government love to creat to get in peoples’ hair.)

> Actually it’s what you get when criminals break the laws established by society…

Ambiguous-Collective Logical Fallacy* — “Society” is not a volitional entity (and “laws” are not ethical pronouncements).

* http://tinyurl.com/28cbw

1% of the population is not a huge number considering the number of crimes we have on the books.

True. And that criminlalization is growing, and becoming more vague.

Despite our rountine grumblings, the U.S. is still the most free in the world. People here are given greater liberty than those in any other country; maybe some have trouble handling it. The tyranny of mustard, as Radley is wont to say….

List many such comparisons, it’s skewed to only those countries that report statistics, and the statistics are taken at face value.

E.g., Cuba and North Korea are essentially nationwide-prisons, yet they’re not listed at 99%, nor is every Islamic country subject to Sharia Law listed at 50% (that representing the female population).

And then there are all those countries in which prisons are eschewed in favor of good old-fashioned beatings, amputations and genocide. (Prisons, after all, take money to build, and what self-respecting tyrant wants to bleed his Swiss accounts for that sort of thing?)

Simplistic charts like this one are generally compiled and promoted with only one thing in mind: Bashing the U.S.

–//–

A more useful comparison would break down the US individual states by crime sector. E.g., are you more likely to spend time in jail for “possession” in which states? Or boinking your girlfriend while a high-school student?

It’d need graphics, too, so Mississippi, et al, would be black zones of hell, while, say, Alaska might be a reasonable light blue.

By the way… studies have shown that inmates who have access to some sort of training while incarcerated are about 50%-70% less likely to re-offend. Maybe we should throw a little money that direction. But again… no politician will ever get anywhere advocating for that constituency.

They don’t really provide any solutions, as usual, but the scenarios they paint that really stand out to me are the ones where ridiculously minor offenders (pot possession/dealing) are sent to prison, where they (sometimes as a survival measure) gain lots of contacts with considerably worse offenders, and therefore graduate to their level, and become real threats.

I don’t think justice-system-wide reforms are going to work, because all you need is one murder that occurs because (or more likely, even just tangentially related to) of that reform and everyone will be right back on the “tough on crime” bandwagon. We do need to be “tough on crime” with the people who commit murders. What we need to do is separate pathetically non-threatening people from the definition of “crime” that we need to be “tough” on.

The fact that I can say “criminal activity” and think of murder — and others think of someone smoking pot in their basement — is a pretty silly situation to be in.