Archives: 2008 February

The USA leads the world in the size of it’s prison population. And not by just a little bit either.

The US prison population almost trebled between 1987 and 2007. A new study of US prisons has found that numbers of people in jail are at an all-time high, with more than 1% of the adult population behind bars. The Pew Center report calls the US the global leader in the rate at which it imprisons its citizens.

Over 2.3 million people were being held this year, it said – far ahead of other countries with large prison populations like South Africa, China, Russia and Iran.

The USA prison population at 750 prisoners per 100,000 in population compares to South Africa’s 341 per 100,000, Iran with 222 per 100,000, and China, a nation often cited by the US as having an unacceptable level of human rights violations, at 119 per 100,000. Among our politician population we probably have the greatest number of hypocrites of any nation on earth as well.

It’s not that the US crime rate is so much greater than other nations. It is that in the US sentencing is so much harsher for minor violations. The Pew Report claims that the growing prison population “is saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford, and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime”.

The numbers were “especially startling”, according to the Pew Center report, for some groups in the population. “While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine.”

The total of 2.3 million adults held in prison – or one in every 99.1 adults – puts the US far ahead of other countries. While the US often likes to be the world leader in various nation ranking categories hopefully having the largest prison population in the world is not one that the government is proud of.

It’s time for common sense to prevail when it comes to the sentencing of people who have committed minor violations. The “Home of the Free and the Brave” is on a slippery downhill slope when 1% of a 303,000,000 population is kept imprisoned, often in overcrowded and deplorable conditions. Certainly, the US has moved far from the moral high ground that it used to occupy.

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According to James Lovelock, mass shortages of food and water loom for humans by the year 2050 as large areas of the planet Earth take on the appearance of Mars.

I have written about James Lovelock and his views on global warming previously. I took another look today as I was looking at the record price levels of agricultural commodities like corn, wheat, and soybeans. While the current bull market in commodities is caused by a complex mix of factors, weather problems and a shortage of rain in major producing areas is part of the problem.

What if over the next few years this trend continues? Global warming will effect us all in various unpleasant ways, including the prospect of starvation for perhaps hundreds of millions, even billions of people.

The following article is not pleasant reading. It is sad to think that much of our progress which has lead and is leading to better and more productive lives for so many around the world may in the end undo civilization as we know it today.

===== From The Sunday Times May 6, 2007 ======

The latest initiatives to stop global warming won’t save us, James Lovelock tells Jonathan Leake. If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States.

We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen, said Lovelock. We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.

Lovelock has delivered such warnings before, but this weekend they have a special resonance. Last week in Bangkok, Thailand, the world’s governments finalised this year’s third and final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) setting out how humanity might save itself from the worst effects of climate change.

In it was a message of hope, albeit a faint one. The report set out a complex mix of political, economic and technological solutions. If they all worked, said the report, they could achieve huge cuts in the 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released by humanity into the air each year, thus keeping global temperature rises below 3C.

At the same time in Cologne, Germany, 4,000 sharp-suited bankers, lawyers and financial traders at Carbon Expo 2007 were congratulating themselves on the booming new markets in carbon credits that will, they boasted, save the world as well as making them rich.

Your vote may count but technology may not always allow your vote to be counted as you wish. This scary video shows how the democratic process can be destroyed by the hacking of voting machines.

Americans tend to be a trusting people. If you vote for one candidate you expect that your vote will be recorded for that candidate. But with so much on the line, especially in a Presidential election, can you be sure that your vote is properly recorded? And with the stakes so high can you be sure that somewhere in the candidate’s organizations there are not at least a few ruthless people who would use a hacker to alter voting results if they thought that they could get away with it?

Sadly, with the paperless voting equipment being increasingly used today across America a team of skilled hackers can probably alter election results pretty much as they please. This is a real and present threat to democracy.

Watch the video and as an American who still has faith in our political system weep.

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