Volume, Volume, Volume!

If America is top at one thing, it's mass incarceration.  With but 5% of the global population, the U.S. has 25% of the global prison population.   Its prison-industrial complex is second to none but, like all successful ideas, sometimes it can be too successful.

America has been so successful at banging up little people for minor drug possession charges that it has accumulated more little people behind bars than it can stuff into even its generous supply of prison cells.   What to do, what to do?

Do you stop tossing little people in prison for minor drug offences?  No, no, not that!  Well what about we still churn most of them through the system only we clear them back out sooner to make space for the overflow?  Brilliant.

the Obama administration will move on Monday to ease overcrowding in federal prisons by ordering prosecutors to omit listing quantities of illegal substances in indictments for low-level drug cases, sidestepping federal laws that impose strict mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offences.

"Although incarceration has a role to play in our justice system, widespread incarceration at the federal, state and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable," Holder's speech says. "It imposes a significant economic burden - totaling $80 billion in 2010 alone - and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate."

 

Holder will also introduce a related set of Justice Department policies that would leave more crimes to state courts to handle, increase the use of drug-treatment programs as alternatives to incarceration, and expand a program of "compassionate release" for "elderly inmates who did not commit violent crimes and have served significant portions of their sentences".

In his latest column for TruthDig, Chris Hedges explores America's Disappeared,  his country's permanent, revolving prison underclass.

In America, when you are poor, you can instantly disappear like this into the subterranean rabbit holes of our vast jail and prison complex. You crawl out weeks, months or years later. You try to pick up where you left off. You avoid the cops. You look for work. There is no work. It is a constant cat-and-mouse game the state plays with the poor. The hunters. The hunted. The poor, no matter what they do, are always potential prey, minnows in a sea of sharks. It is not only the masses in the Middle East and the jihadists who despise us for our purported “values.” The vast, persecuted underclass, the human refuse callously cast aside by our corporate state, the legions of poor our bankrupt media have rendered invisible, the young, violent street toughs with no education, no jobs, no prospects also see through the empty rhetoric of the power elite when it speaks about our freedoms and democracy.

...They cannot change being black and poor. They cannot change their prison records. They cannot change their powerlessness in the face of oppression. They cannot change the cruelty of corporate capitalism or the racism of the police, who Al says threw him to the ground, kicked him repeatedly in the head and called him a “nigger” as he was being arrested the last time. They cannot change the fact that they were denied an education and are denied work at which they can make a living wage. They cannot change the system. And to the system, [they] remain what they have always been—the condemned.