The War on Drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex)
This film sounds like a shoddy conspiracy piece, but it is actually very pertinent (the first couple of minutes are in Dutch, the rest in English). I am posting it since it shows the origins of the situation covered in this excellent piece in yesterday’s New York Times.
The article asks why is it that in 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville could write “In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States” and yet now the country with a twentieth of the world’s population has a quarter of the world’s prisoners, incarcerated at ten times the rate of other Western countries with no actual difference in crime reduction beyond what has happened in Canada.
Some of the conclusions aren’t that surprising: a Protestant dominated, puritan influenced culture, combined with gung-ho libertarianism and an ongoing race paranoia, but one is startling – Democracy. Unlike most of the world, American judges are elected and often on a ticket of tough justice, which leads to the mob rule flavor of democracy, when combined with the previous factors.