The prison door keeps revolving

By Jeff Jacoby May 04, 2014

The United States jails more prisoners than any nation on earth — about 2.3 million, or more than 1 percent of all American adults. Our gigantic penal system is regularly characterized as a national disgrace. I’ve applied the label myself.   Plainly there is something deeply disquieting about a democratic superpower locking up so many people that 25 percent of the world’s reported prisoners are housed in US cells. How can a country with an incarceration rate of 716 inmates per 100,000 residents, roughly five times the global average, think of itself as “The Land of the Free?”

…….. Five years after regaining their freedom, 29 percent of the prisoners had been arrested for a violent offense, 38 percent for a property crime, 39 percent for a drug offense, and 58 percent for public-order offenses. (Many released inmates were arrested on multiple charges.) Only 23 states could provide researchers with complete data on inmates who returned to prison; but among the released prisoners in those states, more than half — 55 percent — ended up behind bars once more.  …… American sociologist Robert Martinson made waves 40 years ago with an influential essay that concluded: “With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.”…..But one thing we know prison can do: It can isolate criminals from society, and thereby make society safer…..To Read More…..

 

My Take - We've heard this "national disgrace" argument over and over again the last 50 years, and mostly by the very people responsible - progressives.  I would like to know what were the figures before 1965.  Let's understand this clearly. Once the nation abandoned the foundational concepts of Judaic/Christian principles "national disgraces" followed like fleas to a dog.  No amount of tinkering by these secular humanists will fix anything if these people have no moral foundation.  Leftists have worked ardently to destroy the only stable moral foundation the world has ever known, with no moral foundation of its own to replace it.  As a result their schemes are doomed to fail.  So we need to be glad these people locked up, and enjoy the disgrace....it saves lives.