Another major school shooting today ... Newtown, Conn

So you admit weapons were made with the banned features. How is that so oralloy? If something is banned then it can't be manufactured, don't you agree? Or are you arguing that a partial ban is the same thing as a ban?

It a fairly small percent of our total jail population as drugs are right on the top.

When I get a chance I will look it up but once more it is not a large percents of the total in fact people in prisons for violence crimes of any kind with or without firearms are less then the people in prison for non violence crimes.

It's a good thing oralloy never tells lies and never resorts to hyperbole.

http://www.libertariannews.org/2011/09/29/victimless-crime-constitutes-86-of-the-american-prison-population/

Victimless Crime Constitutes 86% of The Federal Prison Population
September 29, 2011By michaelsuedeWhen we talk about the war on drugs, which is increasingly turning into a real war, we often overlook the fact that the “criminals” involved in the drug trade aren’t actually violating anyone’s rights. When a drug dealer is hauled before a judge, there is no victim standing behind the prosecutor claiming damages. Everyone participating in the drug trade does so voluntarily. However, there are a lot more crimes for which this is also true. Millions upon millions of Americans have been thrown into cages without a victim ever claiming damages. It is important to look at the burden this mass level of incarceration places upon our society.

In light of that, let us review some statistics which demonstrate just how destructive the mass incarceration of victimless criminals has become to our society. The 2009 federal prison population consisted of:

•Drugs 50.7%
•Public-order 35.0%,
•Violent 7.9%
•Property 5.8%
•Other .7%
Drug offenses are self-explanatory as being victimless, but so too are public-order offenses, which also fall under the victimless crimes category. Public order offenses include such things as immigration, weapons charges, public drunkenness, selling lemonade without a license, dancing in public, feeding the homeless without a permit etc..

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world. Presently 756 per 100,000 of the national population is behind bars. This is in contrast to an average world per-capita prison population rate of 145 per 100,000 (158 per 100,000 if set against a world prison population of 10.65 million), based on 2008 U.N. population data. In other words, the U.S. incarcerates its citizens at a rate that is 5 times the world average.

In 2008, according to the Department of Justice, there were 7,308,200 persons in the US corrections system, of whom 4,270,917 were on probation, 828,169 were on parole, 785,556 were in jails, and 1,518,559 were in state and federal prisons. This means that the U.S. alone is responsible for holding roughly 15% of all the prisoners in the world.

In other words, 1 in 42 Americans is under correctional supervision. This constitutes over 2% of the entire U.S. population. That percentage jumps up drastically if we limit the comparison to working aged adult males, of which there are around 100 million. Over 5% of the adult male population is under some form of correctional supervision, alternatively stated, 1 in 20 adult males are under correctional supervision in the U.S.

According to 2006 statistics, 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men are behind bars, as are 1 in 15 adult black men. If we limit the data to black males between the ages 20 to 34, 1 in 9 are behind bars. Keep in mind that 86% of those men in federal prisons are there for victimless crimes. They have not stolen any property, damaged any property or harmed anyone directly by their actions. Of course, if you are reading this and live in the US, you are paying for all those people to subsist on a daily basis. Roughly 34% of all prisoners in the U.S. are incarcerated for victimless crimes.

In California in 2009 it cost an average of $47,102 a year to incarcerate an inmate in state prison. In 2005 it cost an average of $23,876 per state prisoner nationally. In 2007, $228 billion was spent on police, corrections and the judiciary. That constitutes around 1.6% of total U.S. GDP.

Of course, being the good economists that we are, we must not just look at the cost to incarcerate and police, but also at the opportunity cost to society that putting all those able-bodied men behind bars creates. When a man is put behind bars he is obviously incapable of contributing anything to society. He becomes a complete burden to society while producing nothing in return for the expenses he creates. He becomes a black void of resource destruction. It’s important to remember that money’s value is directly related to the consumer goods that a society produces. If a society produces nothing of value, the money it uses will also be worth nothing of value. If a huge portion of able bodied workers is locked behind bars, society is effectively penalized twice – once for the resources that are diverted into the prison industry and it is penalized again for the opportunity cost of the lost labor of those prisoners.

I find some dark humor in the fact that those who engage in victimless crime don’t create any real victims until they are put behind bars, at which point they cause the State to steal $47,000 a year from the tax paying public. In our justice system today, victims are victimized twice; once by the perpetrator of the crime against them, and the other by the State which then forces the victim to pay for the punishment of their assailant. Clearly our society’s notion of “justice” is logically ridiculous. It’s apparently not OK for someone to steal from you, but its perfectly acceptable for the State to steal from you if the State is going to use that money to punish the person who stole from you. – what kind of asinine system of justice is that?

Oraboy doesn't lie, he just has a liberal definition of the truth.

Rap

Roughly 8 to 9 percents of the total prison population have anything to do with voilence and we are getting these crazy prison populations due to people like you who wish long long sentences for any misdeed and the crazy war on drugs.

In any case no need to wonder the facts are there for even you to find.



http://reason.com/archives/2011/06/08/prison-math


Prison Math
What are the costs and benefits of leading the world in locking up human beings?
Veronique de Rugy from the July 2011 issue

In 2009, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 1,524,513 prisoners in state and federal prisons. When local jails are included, the total climbs to 2,284,913. These numbers are not just staggering; they are far above those of any other liberal democracy in both absolute and per capita terms. The International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College London calculates that the United States has an incarceration rate of 743 per 100,000 people, compared to 325 in Israel, 217 in Poland, 154 in England and Wales, 96 in France, 71 in Denmark, and 32 in India.

America’s enormously high incarceration rate is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to a 2010 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), U.S. incarceration rates between 1880 and 1970 ranged from about 100 to 200 prisoners per 100,000 people. After 1980, however, the inmate population began to grow much more rapidly than the overall population, climbing from about 220 per 100,000 in 1980 to 458 in 1990, 683 in 2000, and 753 in 2008.

Why are American incarceration rates so high by international standards, and why have they increased so much during the last three decades? The simplest explanation would be that the rise in the incarceration rate reflects a commensurate rise in crime. But according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the total number of violent crimes was only about 3 percent higher in 2008 than it was in 1980, while the violent crime rate was much lower: 19 per 1,000 people in 2008 vs. 49.4 in 1980. Meanwhile, the BJS data shows that the total number of property crimes dropped to 134.7 per 1,000 people in 2008 from 496.1 in 1980. The growth in the prison population mainly reflects changes in the correctional policies that determine who goes to prison and for how long.

Mandatory minimum sentencing laws enacted in the 1980s played an important role. According to the CEPR study, nonviolent offenders make up more than 60 percent of the prison and jail population. Nonviolent drug offenders now account for about one-fourth of all inmates, up from less than 10 percent in 1980. Much of this increase can be traced back to the “three strikes” bills adopted by many states in the 1990s. The laws require state courts to hand down mandatory and extended periods of incarceration to people who have been convicted of felonies on three or more separate occasions. The felonies can include relatively minor crimes such as shoplifting.

What have longer prison sentences accomplished? Research by the Pew Center on the States suggests that expanded incarceration accounts for about 25 percent of the drop in violent crime that began in the mid-1990s—leaving the other 75 percent to be explained by things that have nothing to do with keeping people locked up.

As for the costs, state correctional spending has quadrupled in nominal terms in the last two decades and now totals $52 billion a year, consuming one out of 14 general fund dollars. Spending on corrections is the second fastest growth area of state budgets, following Medicaid. According to a 2009 report from the Pew Center on the States, keeping an inmate locked up costs an average of $78.95 per day, more than 20 times the cost of a day on probation.

More important is the long-term impact that the tough-on-crime policies of the last two decades have had on prisoners and society. Housing nonviolent, victimless offenders with violent criminals for years on end can’t possibly help them reintegrate into society, which helps explain why four out of 10 released prisoners end up back in jail within three years of their release.

As the Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and the University of Washington sociologist Becky Pettit showed in a 2010 study published by the Pew Center on the States, incarceration has a lasting impact on men’s earnings. Taking age, education, school enrollment, and geography into account, they found that past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks, and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent. Only 2 percent of previously incarcerated men who started in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution made it to the top fifth 20 years later, compared to 15 percent of never-incarcerated men who started at the bottom.

It isn’t just offenders whose lives are damaged. Western and Pettit note that 54 percent of inmates are parents with minor children, including more than 120,000 mothers and 1.1 million fathers. One in every 28 children has a parent incarcerated, up from 1 in 125 just 25 years ago. Two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.

While we don’t yet have data on the income mobility of these children, Rucker C. Johnson of the Goldman School of Public Policy found in 2009 that children whose fathers have been incarcerated are significantly more likely than their peers to be expelled or suspended from school (23 percent compared to 4 percent). Johnson found that family income, averaged over the years a father is incarcerated, is 22 percent lower than family income the year before his incarceration. Even in the year after the father is released, family income remains 15 percent lower than it was the year before incarceration. Both education and parental income are strong indicators of a child’s future economic mobility.

Attempts to estimate the costs and benefits of prison have proved difficult and controversial. In 1987, for example, the National Institute of Justice economist Edwin Zedlewski used national crime data to calculate that the typical offender commits 187 crimes a year and that the typical crime exacts $2,300 in property losses or in physical injuries and human suffering. Multiplying these two figures, Zedlewski estimated that the typical imprisoned felon is responsible for $430,000 in “social costs” each year he is free. Dividing that figure by an annual incarceration cost of $25,000, he concluded that the public benefits of imprisonment outweigh the costs by 17 to 1.

Zedlewski’s findings have been debunked many times. A severe rebuttal came from the Boalt Hall Law School penologists Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, who argued in a 1988 article published by the National Council of Crime and Delinquency that Zedlewski overstated the net benefit of incarceration by inflating the numerator (crimes per offender and social costs per crime) and deflating the denominator (annual cost of confinement). They cited several studies to bolster their charge, including one indicating that the typical offender commits 15 (as opposed to 187) crimes in a year. According to a 1991 Brookings paper by John J. DiIulio and Anne Morrison Piehl, making this one adjustment to the calculations reduces the benefit/cost ratio to 1.38. In other words, the benefit of incarceration is probably small, especially compared to the high cost of locking people up. Also note that Zedlewski assumed imprisoned offenders were predatory criminals, although a substantial share of real-world convicts are guilty only of victimless crimes.

Fortunately, economists are getting better at understanding how to keep people out of jail. In a 2007 paper for Economic Inquiry, for instance, the U.C.–Santa Barbara economist Jeff Grogger found there are large deterrent effects from increased certainty of punishment and much smaller, generally insignificant effects from increased severity. Such findings call into question the economic rationality of increasingly long prison terms. Who knows how many more millions will be locked up by the time public policy finally catches up with economics?

Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy ([email protected]) is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She writes a monthly economics column for reason.


Veronique de Rugy, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a monthly columnist for the print edition of Reason.

Now after the anti guns nuts are taking on the second amendment they are now going after the first amendment also.

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2012/12/sf_student_writes_dark_poem_ab.php

S.F. Student Writes "Dark" Poem About Newtown School Shooting, Gets SuspendedBy Erin Sherbert Fri., Dec. 28 2012 at 12:10 PM 5 CommentsCategories: Education



via ABC7
Courtni reads her poem
Update 2:27 p.m.: Heidi Anderson, spokeswoman with San Francisco Unified School District, told us that Life Learning Academy is a charter school, and therefore SFUSD is not involved in its student discipline.

Original Story 12:10 p.m.: A high school senior is facing expulsion after writing a poem that raised some red flags for local school officials.

ABC7 reports that Courtni Webb was suspended for the "dark" prose she penned less than two weeks after 20 students and six school officials were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Specifically, Life Learning Academy officials on Treasure Island in San Francisco were a bit alarmed by this line in Webb's poem:

I understand the killings in Connecticut. I know why he pulled the trigger. Why are we oppressed by a dysfunctional community of haters and blamers?
School officials are considering expelling her, although Webb told ABC7 that her poem was nothing more than a commentary on society. In fact, she says she often writes poems -- and turns them in to her teachers - that talk about suicide and sadness.

"The meaning of the poem is just talking about society and how I understand why things like that incident happened. So it's not like I'm agreeing with it, but that's how the school made it seem," Webb told the news outlet.

SF Weekly contacted the school district for comment, we'll let you know if we hear back.

The poem wasn't a class assignment; rather, a teacher discovered it in class and didn't hesitate to report it to the school principal.

Webb likened herself to Stephen King, saying the macabre novelist writes "weird stuff all the time" but that doesn't mean he's going to do it or act it out, she said.

But after the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., schools like Life Learning Academy aren't taking its chances. The academy has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to the threat of violence. A "violation of any one of these rules can result in dismissal from school."

The girl's mother, Valerie Statham, said that she felt the school was overreacting, especially since her daughter has no history of violent behavior. "She didn't threaten anybody. She didn't threaten herself. She simply said she understood why."

Statham is expecting to hear from the district when school resumes on Jan. 7.

Funny how they never manage to do so.

I've already explained my position very clearly, and you are just trying to misrepresent it in an attempt to obscure the facts.

Says the clown who can't show anywhere that I'm wrong (unless you want to count superfluous trivia).

"They" do...just about everyone you interact with does. I do.

You just refuse to acknowledge it...and instead lie more by claiming you never lie.

Why Oraboy--evidence of your liberal definition of truth and honesty is rampart and obvious to anyone with a lukewarm IQ.

You can start here And walk in any direction..

http://able2know.org/user/oralloy/

My my my, for someone to be so self acclaimed
superior you are way way to easy.

Perhaps your new nic should be OraLiar!

Rap

Liar.





It is not in my habit to accept lies.

You see, unlike you, I actually have integrity.





Falsely accusing me of your own dishonesty does not change the fact that you are the one who is lying.

Your low IQ is beside the point. I do not share your dishonesty and tendency to lie all the time.

You know, I've always felt that the ignore feature was the wrong way to go. But perhaps I should reassess that view. Way too much retarded dishonest filth polluting the board.

My my my Oraliar--you've added a new word to your liberal dictionary--integrity.

Oraliar you are way way way too easy

Rap

*PLONK*

Damn, I hope you don't become a politician, you'll put everyone who doesn't agree with you in mental institute with your broken logic.

I think you'll find that nearly all gun owners or rushing to get guns under the threat of a ban, are merely advocating choice, and not more guns as the solution. The NRA does not speak for everyone who owns a firearm.

I am just merely advocating that people have a choice to protect themselves, and not have to depend on others for it.

....Nice critical-thinking skills and communication through writing skills you have there... You can't teach what you do not know.
Also, Adam Lanza did not use an "assault weapon," but he did have a rifle that doesn't require a manual reload after every shot fired (although the specific model of Bushmaster has not been released, it is safe to assume the model was not an assault rifle since Connecticut already bans the sale of “assault weapons,” and there is no indication that Nancy Lanza bought or owned her guns illegally).
Difference between an "assault" rifle and a semi automatic is clearly made by politicians for political reasons, as seen by the comparing the difference between the two:






By the way, isn't it great that schools are now trained to hide under such situations? This is strangely reminiscent to the old "duck and cover" tactic taught in schools to evade a nuclear detonation during the Cold War.

Oboy! I'm now able to demonstrate Oraliar's fictions with aplomb.

BONK!

Rap

What facts? You didn't answer the question. All gun-related crimes are not necessarily violent--they simply involve the use of a gun, which might be used merely to brandish or threaten.

I asked...

Gee, I wonder how many citizens are in prison for gun-related crimes, or crimes in which guns were used--because guns are so easily obtainable in our country?

You didn't even address the question, let alone answer it.

Surely, you aren't stupid enough to try to claim that the easy availability of guns doesn't conrtibute to the crime rate--or are you that stupid?