US Incarceration Rate

Recently, I saw a link to a NY Times article called Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations' [nytimes.com].


The article features a list of statistics and a guess as to reasons why the incarceration rate is so much higher in the US than other developed nations. Here's a quote:

"The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners."

"...it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher."

I thought that it was an interesting article. Especially because I (and probably most other Americans) feel that prison sentences (particularly for violent crime) are too short.

If you ask me, if you are convicted of 1st degree murder, rape, or child molestation, you should never be allowed back into society ever again. You can't be reformed or rehabilitated, and you're a danger to society. I don't understand how people who commit these crimes get off with only a few years in jail. And I'm more outraged by people in the Catholic church getting no punishment for harboring child molesters than I am with people getting jail sentences that seem too long.

Image from Gipic's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].