Why does the USA have so many people in jail?

[Apologies if I am wandering childlike into the jaws of a monstrous irony - I'm notoriously bad at detecting it, especially in writing.]Personally I don't know what being tough on criminals, in the terms I imagine you are envisaging, achieves. I'm not sure how effective a deterrent it is, and I'm not sure what benefits eye for an eye justice bring to the victims. I'd actually be really interested if anyone can point me in the direction of any decent studies into these questions.I think the only real benefit from locking people up/judicial killing is that it prevents them from reoffending until their release/reincarnation. Another way to prevent them from reoffending would be effective behavioural therapy or quality education. Its just finding a way to do this effectively that's the tricky bit. But the end result - a functioning or semi-functioning member of society back, rather than a disfunctional one locked away - sounds really attractive, and to me seems worth pursuing.In my squishy caramel core it seems barbarous to treat people ill who have been made criminal through ill treatment. It seems barbarous to treat people ill who have been made criminal through mental illness. I guess that leaves people who are criminal.. through necessity? Through the influence of their peers? I think its barbarous to treat them ill too.I don't really believe in evil. It doesn't make sense to me. I can only understand people's actions as consequences of earlier events, and not as the result of some amorphous cloud of badness.Personally I don't think someone who poisons the water supply of a major city and kills tens or even hundreds of thousands of people should face the death penalty. Perhaps that makes me seem eccentric, but I genuinely don't see how that would help.

The treatment of child molesters in our society is one of the more difficult questions for us to deal with.Personally I think your "scarlet letter" approach leads inevitably to social exclusion at best, and probably a lynching and I don't agree with it.I don't have any facts with which to back this up (I would love to know where to find them if they exist) but I have got the idea from somewhere that abusers were often abused themselves. You cant just give a child molestor a pat on the back and commiserate with them about their abusive childhood when they rape a small child, but at the same time, it strikes me as monumentally inconsistent to lumber someone with victim status and all that goes with it until they reach adulthood, when they fail to resist the sexual urges that dominate their life, and then to brand them a monster.

The fear of declining moral standards is a recurring one: Try or Its the kind of millenial idea that doesn't go away. I don't think there's much evidence for things getting worse.

Hi sidelined,Thanks for your considered response.The lack of empathy for those in society makes me angry. I abhor violence of any kind against others, though not to the degree that Jesus advocated when he said turn the other cheek; I don't think that helps the cheek-turner or their assailant. But people who commit wilful acts of violence are, in my opinion only channels down which prehistoric rage and injustice are flowing, and not in themselves springs of that curate's egg, that inexplicable joke called "evil".I believe that abuse begets abuse, so I agree that it is imperative to break the cycle. If we can stem the tide through rehabilitation rather than through judicial killing or incarceration, then I feel that we would be winning some kind of victory over an ancient savagery that still resounds loudly in modern culture.If someone learns in childhood that they can only find comfort in damaging other psychologically or physically, then I think they deserve every chance to be rehabilitated. Can you imagine a more barren, unhappy life? I realise that it might not be possible to rehabilitate some, perhaps many, and I believe that these people should not be handed opportunities to hurt others again. I know this is problematic.But I don't think it's naive to hope for a world like this; I think it's humanitarian.Why are we so far from such a world? Because we are taught that revenge can bring peace, because we are taught that some people commit terrible acts because they choose to be evil, and most of all because in order to empathise with victims of violent crime it is necessary for us to believe that they must be forever marked and changed by what has been done to them.Some of these things become true because sufficient people believe them, but I'm not sure if all do. I'm not sure if a wife can feel true contentment when her husband's killer is captured and killed.You have perhaps heard of the case in this country of a paediatrician who was almost lynched because the mob confused the two words?http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/901723.stmThat is the depth of the ignorance and fear that has to be faced. Is it possible to educate a population like this? I hope so; I fear not.

My gut feeling is that in London there is broadly the same amount of crime going on here now than there was ten years ago. I have no idea whether that is correct or not; as is usually in these cases, my gut feeling probably reflects my own personal beliefs more than reality. It sounds frightening, but how much confidence do you have in the figures you've seen?If more crime is actually happening in these places, do you think this is the result of an upsurge in evil? I wonder what you might think a sudden glut of evil on one place might indicate. The fact is that crime rates are always going up and down: they can't do anything else, except stay exactly the same, and that probably doesn't happen very often.If crime rates soared internationally, that might indicate something quite strange, but I'd imagine that these things average out: as crime in Philly rises, you could point to another world city that has a crime rate that is falling by a similar rate.Personally I don't believe in evil, and instead ascribe people's actions to socio-economic factors, and the influence of their experiences. This is because I don't believe in free will.However, I think this might be straying off topic a little. To bring it back on topic, you seem to be suggesting that America has more people in gaol because it has a population that is, on average, more evil than the population of Japan. the assumption being, I suppose, that imprisonment figures give a fairly transparent "evil" index. That's fair enough, but it does lead to some slightly embarassing conclusions: - chiefly, I suppose, that black Americans are 8.2 times more evil than white Americans.http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/Rcedrg00-01.htmCheerio[edited to add a bit of clarity to final sentence]This message has been edited by Tusko, 13-Apr-2006 11:34 AM