Land of the free

Why does the US need to lock so many people up?

Their prisons house more convicts than China and India combined.

American Prison Planet
The Bush Administration as Global Jailor
By Nick Turse

Today, the United States presides over a burgeoning empire -- not only the "empire of bases" first described by Chalmers Johnson, but a far-flung new network of maximum security penitentiaries, detention centers, jail cells, cages, and razor wire-topped pens. From supermax-type isolation prisons in 40 of the 50 states to shadowy ghost jails at remote sites across the globe, this new network of detention facilities is quite unlike the gulags, concentration-camps, or prison nations of the past.

Even with a couple million prisoners under its control, the U.S. prison network lacks the infrastructure or manpower of the Soviet gulag or the orderly planning of the Nazi concentration-camp system. However, where it bests both, and breaks new incarceration ground, is in its planet-ranging scope, with sites scattered the world over -- from Europe to Asia, the Middle East to the Caribbean. Unlike colonial prison systems of the past, the new U.S. prison network seems to have floated almost free of surrounding colonies. Right now, it has only four major centers -- the "homeland," Afghanistan, Iraq, and a postage-stamp-sized parcel of Cuba. As such, it already hovers at the edge of its own imperial existence, bringing to mind the unprecedented possibility of a prison planet. In a remarkably few years, the Bush administration has been able to construct a global detention system, already of near epic proportions, both on the fly and on the cheap. ...

Take a peek, its a sobering read.

On a similar note but vastly different from the subject matter of Mr Turse's article, why does New Zealand have such a high prison population, very high proprotionally for our population?

Something isn't working.... and locking people up and building more prisions is not addressing the issues, its sidelining them and only giving the un caring mobs like the Serious Sentencing Trust fuel for their heartless campaigns.

We're so quick to legislate and so slow to try and understand.

I reckon in a country the size of mine there shouldn't need to be more than perhaps a few hundred people (if that high) locked up - for their crimes.

Naturally to have a nation with few convicted offenders so much would need to change

That might be a good thing