The Prisoner

'Where am I?'
'In The Village.'
'What do you want?'
'Information.'
'Who are you?'
'I am Number Two.'
'Who is Number One?'
'You are Number Six.'
'I am not a number! I am a free man!!'

Number 6: Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment,
and will die here like rotten cabbages.

--The Prisoner (1967), Patrick McGoohan
__________

Here is some perspective on the U.S. penal system compared with those of the rest of the world. The article is a informative read [''Florida's Incarceration Rate is Booming.''] It is a topic which should be of concern to all Americans, both for its legal, economic and ethical ramifications.

Quoting from a National Council on Crime and Delinquency report, Fraser notes, “The rate of imprisonment in the United States is considerably higher than any other industrialized nation. To ignore it is to condone the flagrant waste of money and lives and the crime-producing effects of needless imprisonment and to perpetuate the myth that more imprisonment means better protection of the public.”

The Atlantic magazine recently wrote a piece on the Saudi's effort to deprogram terrorists, and integrate them back into society. America must surmount its arbitrarily punitive stance towards non-violent offenders if it is is to become a more productive, less fearful society.

If we continue on our current track, our growth industries will be prisons, managed [i.e., life-sentence of illness] health care, and the military. It provides a darkly dystopian vision of a people marching off into hostile actions, returning broken into the maws of a healthcare [''illness care''] behemoth, and getting locked up when they can't function within the paradigm any longer.

Following are some excerpts to whet your appetite:

''With only 5 percent of the world's people, the United States is home to 23 percent of the world's prisoners.''

''Recent reports show that 45 of the 50 democratically elected state governments in the U.S., including Florida, imprison their citizens at a faster pace than any of the foreign governments headed by dictators.''

''Rulers in Libya, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, China and Pakistan made Parade magazine's 2005 world's worst dictators list. . . [T]he incarceration rates for these five dictatorships - the number of persons in prison for every 100,000 population - ranges from a low of 57 in Pakistan to a high of 207 in Libya.''

''By comparison, prison policies made in Tallahassee locked up 499 state citizens for every 100,000 population in 2005. In other words, Florida imprisons its people at a rate more than two times faster than Muammar al-Qaddafi's Libya and eight times faster than Pakistan under Gen. Pervez Musharraf. If inmates held in local jails in Florida were added, the spread would be even wider.''

''Why are prisons in America filling at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world? Some say our crime rate is the cause.''

''[However] changes in crime explained only 12% of the prison rise, while changes in sentencing policy accounted for 88% of the increase.”

''Legislatively dictated sentences for even minor offenses tie the hands of judges and juries. These mandatory minimum punishments continue to keep hundreds of thousands behind bars for using or selling tiny amounts of 'illicit' substances.''

''[A]bout one-half of all inmates in the U.S. are serving time for nonviolent offenses.''

''This uniquely American belief in prisons as the all-purpose punishment for offenses great and small has resulted in one in every 136 U.S. residents living behind bars.''

Fraser notes the high recidivism rate for released inmates, for as we have noted before, there is no better training ground for criminal misconduct that incarceration among a school of offenders.

All thing considered, the American prison system, and the judicial system feeding it, is a bloated bureaucracy in dire need of reform. More beds and prisons is not the answer for a healthy democracy.