@firefly,
My my Firefly you are far more of a sadist then Hawkeye ever dream of being.
An a racist, as I can not see you thinking there is anything wrong with for example sentencing blacks for must longer sentences for dealing in crack then whites for dealing in cocaine of the same amounts.
Here is an example of why we have ten times the percent of our population lock up then the UK does..
Under federal law, a judge must sentence a person convicted of possession of a kilogram of heroin to at least 10 years. The same offender in Britain would receive a maximum sentence of 6 months.18
http://www.usfca.edu/law/docs/criminalsentencing
C r u e l a n d U n u s ua l
U.S. Sentencing Practices in a Glob al Context
Center
Executive Summar y
“Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our
sentences too long.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy1
In the United States, people who are found in possession of drugs, a non-violent offense, can be sentenced to die behind bars.2 A person can get a 25 year to life sentence for stealing golf clubs if he has committed two previous offenses,3 or a life sentence if he has stolen small sums of money three times.4 A person can get a series of consecutive sentences for each of the component parts of his conduct, such as counting each child pornography file as a separate offense, resulting in a 150 year sentence, much longer than if that person had actually molested a child.5 A person who sells a handful of drugs can face a andatory sentence of 15 years.6 In many states, a child can be prosecuted at any age, tried as an adult, and sentenced to life without parole.7 U.S. law allows the same defendant to face prosecution twice, by both the federal and state government.
And even if legislators decide to enact laws that lighten sentences, the new law does not automatically apply to prisoners already serving their sentences.9
All of these sentencing practices—life without the possibility of parole, “three strikes” laws, consecutive sentences, mandatory minimums, juvenile justice laws, dual sovereignty, and non-retroactive application of ameliorative law—are used frequently in the United States in ways they are not in the rest of the world.
These American practices, focused on goals of deterrence and retribution, neglect the possibility of rehabilitation
Meanwhile, international human rights law places social rehabilitation and reformation as the aims of any penitentiary system. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a human rights treaty that the United States has signed and ratified, says, “The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.”10 By ratifying this document, the United States has agreed that it will uphold this basic human right.Despite this obligation, the United States is an outlier among countries in its sentencing practices. The U.S. is among the minority of countries (20%) known to researchers as having life without parole (LWOP) sentences. The vast majority of countries that do allow for LWOP sentences have high restrictions on when they can be issued, such as only for murder or for two or more convictions of life sentence-eligible crimes. The number of prisoners serving LWOP sentences is more than
41,000 in the United States.11 In contrast, there are 59 serving such sentences in Australia,12 41 in England,13 and 37 in the Netherlands.14 The size of the U.S.’s LWOP population dwarfs other countries’ on a per capita basis as well; it is 51 times Australia’s, 173 times England’s, and 59 times the Netherlands’.15Recidivism statutes in the United States allow a person with multiple convictions to be given lengthy sentences. While many countries take past criminal history into account for sentencing, very few of them apply a blanket punishment that is as harsh as those used in the United States, where 3,700 people who have never committed a violent crime are serving 25
years to life in California alone.16A systemic problem in the United States is that courts have not considered consecutive sentencing, or punishing one wrong as if it were two or more, as a major problem.17 As a result, they have not offered comprehensive remedies or established clear lines on when sentences should be consecutive or concurrent. Only 21% of countries around the world, including the United States, allow uncapped consecutive sentences for multiple crimes arising out of the same act.
Mandatory minimum sentences in the United States have also increased sentence lengths, particularly for drug crimes.
Under federal law, a judge must sentence a person convicted of possession of a kilogram of heroin to at least 10 years. The same offender in Britain would receive a maximum sentence of 6 months.18
There is no minimum age of criminal liability in many U.S. jurisdictions (in 32 out of 50 states) and in the 18 states that do have them, the age is less than 10.19 International legal standards however suggest the minimum age of criminal liability to be 12.20 The United States is only one of 16% of countries in the world that allow for juveniles to be tried and sentenced as adults. The United States is the only country in the world that in practice sentences juveniles to life without parole.21 Its maximum sentence for juveniles, life without parole, is much more severe than those found in the majority of the world (65%), which either limit sentences to 20 years or less or reduce the degree of the crime for juveniles. The United States, Somalia, and South Sudan are the only three countries in the world that are not state parties to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.22
The United States, Canada, and Micronesia are the only countries known to researchers that allow successive prosecution of the same defendant by both the federal and state government for the same crime.23
International law and practice indicate that when a change of law will benefit an offender it should apply retroactively. The majority of countries in the world (67%) provide for this type of retroactive application of ameliorative law. In contrast, the U.S. federal government and state legislatures frequently refuse to apply the lighter penalty to those already sentenced.24
The sentencing practices in the United States persist at the same time that the United States has the largest prison population in the world and the highest incarceration rate in the world.25 Never before have so many people been locked up for so long and for so little as in the United States.