A System Bereft of Justice
by Paul Craig Roberts
While enjoying Christmas, good food and drink with family and friends in the warmth and comfort of your home, take a moment to remember the falsely imprisoned. Think about how your own family would handle the grief, because wrongful imprisonment can happen to you.
In a just published book, Thinking About Crime, Michael Tonry, a distinguished American law professor and director of Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, reports that the US has the highest percentage of its population in prison of any country on earth. The US incarceration rate is as much as 12 times higher than that of European countries.
Unless you believe that Americans are more criminally inclined than other humans, what can explain the US incarceration rate being so far outside the international mainstream? I can think of the following reasons:
In order to prove that they are "tough on crime," politicians have criminalized behavior that is legal elsewhere.
Many innocent Americans are in jail.
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Government routinely breaks the laws. So says Judge Andrew P. Napolitano in the current issue of Cato Policy Report and in his book, Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws. Judge Napolitano reports on cases of torture, psychological abuse, and frame-ups of innocents that he discovered as the presiding judge. Any American naïve enough to trust the police and prosecutors should read what Napolitano has to say.
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