Bad news on the impending police state here in the U.S.: it is here. The indefinite detention (without trial) of suspected terrorists, both foreign and American to the increasing militarization of police forces of our country, there is little evidence that any level of government is prepared to "enter" the extra-law, many of which are derived from the Patriot Act anti-terrorism objectives.

The New Yorker recently published an article on incarceration in the United States, highlighting some very disturbing facts about the "land of freedom"

The high rate of incarceration in recent decades is also surprising that the number of prisoners in 1980, there were about 220 prisoners by hundreds of thousands of Americans in 2010 the number had tripled to 731. No other country even comes close to this. In the last two decades, money that states spend on prisons has increased by six times the rate of spending on higher education.

More than half of all black men without high school diploma to go to prison at some point in their lives. The mass incarceration on a scale almost unprecedented in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today, perhaps the fundamental fact, and that slavery was a fundamental fact of 1850. Indeed, there are more black men in the power of the criminal justice system in prison, on probation or parole, who were in slavery below. Above all, there are more people in the "prison supervision" in the United States-more than six million, who were in The Gulag Archipelago Stalin at its peak.

So what is to contribute to the continued escalation of the prison? (Hint: .. There is an increase in violent crime figures are at their lowest level in nearly half a century) No, the problem is that the justice system has been in the position of the redefinition of "criminal activity" while at the same time have the judgment removed its discretion by national policies:

William J. Stuntz, a professor of the Faculty of Law at Harvard University who died shortly before his masterpiece, "The Collapse of Criminal Justice in America" ??was published last fall, is the the most energetic defender of the view that jail scandal comes the Enlightenment of the time, "procedural" nature of American justice. Run through the immediate causes of the epidemic in prisons: the growth of the Rockefeller drug laws, after punishing minor infractions of prison mayor, "zero tolerance" policing, which added to the group, to mandatory sentencing laws, which prevented the performance of trial judges.

Exhibit A: The war against drugs. Nothing has been ineffective for a longer period of time, the so-called war against drugs. This is directly linked with the other items on the list of Stuntz. "Zero tolerance" policies have had any kind of perspective or judgment of the judges' hands and became the possession of small quantities of controlled substances in 30 years. Zero tolerance is creeping into other areas of life as well, evidenced by the public schools to punish four years, students embrace each other ("sexual harassment") or the fact that the highest percentage additions to sex offender registries are teenage boys aged 14-16. Among the growth of zero tolerance and broadening the definition of terms such as "cyberbullying," "sexual assault" and "terrorism", it is unlikely that the rate of incarceration in our country will diminish in the short term.



This plays right into the hands of the beneficiaries of draconian zero tolerance policies: private prisons.

companies are paid by the state, and its gain depends on spending as little as possible to prisoners and prisons. It is difficult to imagine a greater difference between the gain of the public and private good: the interest of private prisons is not evident in the right office to have the minimum number of prisoners, but with the greatest number, which is cheap as possible. No document is more frightening that in American life recently as the 2005 annual report of the largest of these companies, Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is required to notify investors of the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone could turn off the tap of the condemned:

Our growth is generally dependent on our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and operate new prisons and detention. . . . Demand for our facilities and services may be affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency of the sentence and the sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently prohibited by our criminal laws. For example, changes in respect of drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted and sentenced, which could reduce demand for prisons to accommodate them.



This is at least as cool as seeing our representatives blithely trampling our civil rights, perhaps even more when you realize that it is unlikely that any connection between the judgment required and the lobbying efforts of private prisons. The control arm of the U.S. government were pushed to criminalize acts of increasingly ambiguous with titles like "cyberterrorism". There have been few serious efforts in extending back from the war against drugs or the war against terrorism, despite all the evidence of minimal success in any business.
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