Quote Originally Posted by Tom Odom View Post
This report was interesting. Are you familiar with it or the organization?

Tom
I am familiar w/ both. Not a lot to add information wise other then the organization is fairly well respected w/i the justice community. While articles on the specific relationship between US incarceration rates and the ROW are not that common, most articles by non-partisan justice groups make mention of the disparity of US rates of incarceration to the rest of the industrialized world and the growing percentage of non-violent drug offenders on mandatory sentencing w/i the prison population. Most "get tough on crime" politicians seem to make the situation worse and actually lead to conditions were invasive criminals (i.e thieves and crimes of assault) are forced to be released earlier to make more room for drug and "three-strike" minor offenders. A note to Ken and others: most non-partisan justice organizations have also concluded that while the old adage that “10% of the criminal population commits 90% of the crime” is basically true, you can not reduce crime by 90% by incarcerating that 10% since other individuals step into the roles of the incarcerated criminals. With the exception of extremely violent criminals (murders and rapists) longer sentences tend to have little utility in either protecting the community or in acting as deterrents to crime. This is all second-hand and I can dig up the reports if anyone is interested, or you can do it yourselves. Even the federal Justice departments and agencies tend to support these findings if you wanted to start there.
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