More and more I realize how little the law means to so many. The law only counts if someone is caught. Then the caught must be convicted. And in the U.S., convicted they are:

• The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s people – but 24 percent of the world’s prisoners.
• In absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, the U.S. has more prisoners than any other country, including China and Russia.
• From the 1920’s until the 1970’s, the U.S. prison population was stable at about 110 per 100,000, about the same as our peer nations today. But now more than 700 people out of every 100,000 are behind bars.

In the United States today there are more prisoners than farmers. And while most prisoners in America are from urban communities, most prisons are now in rural areas. During the last two decades, the large-scale use of incarceration to solve social problems has combined with the fall-out of globalization to produce an ominous trend: prisons have become a "growth industry" in rural America.

Report of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice

“The additional cost of confining an inmate to death row, as compared to the maximum security prisons where those sentenced to life without possibility of parole ordinarily serve their sentences, is $90,000 per year per inmate. With California’s current death row population of 670, that accounts for $63.3 million annually.”

Using conservative rough projections, the Commission estimates the annual costs of the present (death penalty) system to be $137 million per year.
The cost of the present system with reforms recommended by the Commission to ensure a fair process would be $232.7 million per year.
The cost of a system in which the number of death-eligible crimes was significantly narrowed would be $130 million per year.
The cost of a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty would be $11.5 million per year.

http://www.bvblackspin.com/2010/04/0...voting-rights/

How disheartening.