ANOTHER TYPE OF PRISON

In the good ol' USA,  we believe in second chances. Except when it comes to crime and punishment. Then it's lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key.  With  5% of the world's population, the US has 25% of the world's prisoners. We spend 80 BILLION dollars a year on incarcerating prisoners in the US. 

Germany does it differently, as was detailed on Sunday night's 60 Minutes episode.  You can view it and the web story here. 

In Germany, prison isn't meant to punish, it's designed to mirror normal life as much as possible. Among the privileges enjoyed by German prisoners: immaculate facilities, organized sports, video games and keys to their own cells. Inmates can wear street clothes and can freely decorate their own cells -- keeping all sorts of household objects that American prison guards might consider dangerous. Prisoners who demonstrate good behavior can even leave prison for work or weekend getaways. Average Americans may balk at this level of freedom for convicted criminals, but prisons in Germany cost less and produce far fewer repeat offenders than U.S. prisons. 
...

In Germany, 75 percent of prisoners sentenced to life are paroled after 20 years or less, even Bernd Junge, a contract killer who shot a woman to death. Should Junge, who Whitaker meets on an unsupervised weekend furlough, be offered a future? "Yes, he should," says Joerg Jesse, a psychologist and the director of prisons in the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Jesse says German inmates deserve rehabilitation, not retribution, during their prison stays.

The real goal is re-integration into society, train them to find a different way to handle their situation outside, life without further crimes, life without creating new victims," says Jesse. "We cannot see the sense in just locking people up for their whole life. Your prisons will fill up and you'll have to build new prisons and so on and I think that was the situation in the U.S.

Germany spend less than the US per capita on it's prisoners and the recidivism rate is 50% less than the US. 
So Germany does it better and cheaper. And the main difference is that Germany believes the primary goal of prison is NOT punishment, but rehabilitation.  And that lack of "red meat" punishment can't make Bible-worshiping Republicans happy. After all, the bible says nothing about forgiveness and the goodness of people, right? 

See You In Court. 

...AND THROW AWAY THE KEY

The US has 5% of the earth's population.

The US has 70& of the earth's lawyers (most of them waiting in line to get into the REGJB).

And the US has 25% of the earth's prisoners.

Those are the statistics in this startling article in the NY Times:
PRISONERS

Here are some other highlights:
China- that bastion of godless communism with no respect for individual rights, has four times the population of the US, and one million less prisoners (2.6 million versus 1.6 million).

1 in 100 American adults are locked away in prison.

From the Times article:
It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.
“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”
No more.
“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”
...
The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

Rumpole says: For shame. And lets make sure we keep spending money making sure everyone who wants a gun gets one.

Here at home the State Attorneys Office is doing its part by seeking more jail sentences in county court and imposing the "trial tax" for those imprudent enough to actually take depositions, file motions, go to trial, and do all the other reprehensible things that the constitution (but NOT Kathy Rundle) gives them the right to do.

See You In Court, doing our small part to keep those numbers low.

PS. County Court lawyers- I have received your emails by the dozens today and I am acting on them in an appropriate manner. Please give me a day or two to sort this out.