Crime and Punishment

I chose the topic of crime and punishment because I believe it is the topic that has the potential to alter your life the most. Most of the blogs I looked at were opinionated pieces about Capital Punishment or the fact that we have too many people imprisoned. I decided to take a stab at this style of blog:


Many people today see America as a place of freedom and prosperity, a place where liberty and justice are valued by the government. It is the land of the free after all.

 But how accurate is this?

While we make fun of Russia and their commie country and their bears riding on unicycles we are also ignoring a rather large elephant in our proverbial room. The United States has the highest incarceration rate out of any country in the world. We are higher than Russia, China, and Mexico. Even North Korea sends fewer of its citizens to prison than us. We currently have 716 out of every 100,000 people imprisoned. One out of every 9 African American men will be incarcerated between the ages of 20 and 34. Over 50% of inmates are there for drug charges. Is it fair to champion ourselves as the pinnacle of individual liberty when we lock our own citizens up in a concrete block because they decided to smoke a plant?

Is this really what the United States was founded on? Should we really be wasting money keeping people locked up in jail for victim-less crimes when there are so many different things we could spend our tax money on? That's up to our nation to decide, but if you listen closely you can faintly make out the sound of Thomas Jefferson softly crying in the distance.