Appellate Law

Support of the notion that the US is not ?prison nation.?

By S. COTUS

Just about every year, someone comes out with a survey which says that the US is imprisoning more people than other countries.  There are three reactions to this:

• This is bad.  We are an unenlightened society that likes to put people in jail because we have failed make it possible for people to conform their conduct to societal norms.
• This is good.  There are lots of reasons to put people in jail, and society is better off if people that are not from families that value college educations go right from the cradle to jail.
• This is inevitable.  States like Texas havea a culture that makes it necessary to put as many Texans in jail as possible.  Texans just like to commit crimes.  It is their culture.  On the other hand, a state like Maine has a culture that values the rule of law, and therefore, there is less of a need to put those people in jail.  (See BJS publication for stats.)

But, in browsing Nationmaster, I came across an interesting statistic.  I am not sure what it is based upon.  The US is not in the top 10 or 25 countries in terms of ?sentence served length.?  We rank #30, with an average sentence length of 29 months.  So, maybe we really are not as much of a prison nation as previously thought. 

Full post as published by Appellate Law and Practice on August 27, 2008 (boomark / email).