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Its odd that the US still incarcerates a lot more people per capita than Russia. Over a million more people in prison than China too. Lots of overzealous law enforcement, in my opinion.
MB and Presumption of Innocence - 99 Bad Guys and 1 Good One
=== Those Gulags Are Spacious, Komrade ===
In Russian criminal trials, the "defendant" is always guilty. Well, not always: only 99.64% of the time.
Russian judicial philosophy is rooted in the idea that the rights of the victim, and of the state (representing the community, victimized) weigh as heavily (sic) as the rights of the accused.
In Russia, they're not nearly as concerned with a poor schmuck going to the gulag undeservedly, as they are concerned with somebody getting away with something they shouldn't.
So they avoid jury trials wherever possible, because juries acquit defendants a lot. When juries do acquit, post-KGB operatives often storm the courtroom and re-arrest the defendant and take him away for punishment.
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And that's talking about today, in post-Soviet perestroika! We're not talking about Gorbachev's USSR, much less Joseph Stalin's.
In America, we'd rather see 99 guilty men go free than see one innocent man executed. But in Russia, it's not even a 50-50 philosophy: they'd rather see 99 innocent men hung, than one real bad guy go free. We're talking about Putin, not the man in the street.
Most Americans are well and truly out-of-touch as to what life is like elsewhere, and that affects our decisionmaking. Grotesquely.
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Codified law is only an attempt to "quantify" decent behavior.
We can't say, "drive safe," so we say, "drive 55 mph and drive sober." Even sober has to be defined, but the 0.08% metric isn't from On High. It is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to define decent behavior. Don't run over kids.
"Presumption of innocence" is not a technical principle. It is one of our attempts to define decency, and humanity. It is one aspect of the difference between Stalin's Russia, and having a life worth living.
In Russia, Milton Bradley would have to prove that he was innocent, or he would be punished.
You think that makes accusation a trigger-finger game? You're right. You think people live in secure frames of mind there? You're wrong.
You think that emphasizing "the rights of the victim" is progressive thinking? We're going to need some gulags, komrade. It costs too much money to put defendants in King County lockup.
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Comments
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Since they will shoot you in the head for non-capital crimes in Russia, bad guys are a bit less cavalier about risking time?
Amazing to me that we incarcerate as few people as we do, considering how genteel we are about punishment (relative to, say, Saddam's or Putin's thugs).
'Because sentence against an evil work is not carried out speedily, therefore the heart of a man is fully set in him to do evil.' The U.S. punishment system is not scary.
Which is fine with me, but if it were me, I wouldn't call America 'overzealous' about law enforcement because it's so much more concerned about the rights of the condemned than other countries are.
Talk to an emigre from Moscow sometime, brother :- ) ... they shuffle through the streets in gray trenchcoats like zombies, because the government keeps an ironfisted hammerlock everybody, good guys and bad.
Mussolini made the trains run on time. You could empty the jails pretty quick if you were willing to fire live ammo into crowds like Russia and China are.
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we could reduce crime by a lot if we used the Chinese method, but no red blooded American would want that. Last I checked, the Constitution meant something. Instead we lock up ever non-violent drug offender we can.
Biggest myth of all - rising crime in America. Crime is way, way down over the last 30 years. So why is incarceration way, way up?
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The MASSIVE upswing in U.S. incareration rates can be traced back to exactly the point where the "war on drugs" began. Prison population has quadrupled since 1980, even though violent crime and property crime rates have been declining since the early 1990s.
Why so many in jail? Because the number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980. 22% of those in Federal and State prisons were convicted on drug charges.
The "three strikes" laws, have turned lots of drug users into permanent (life sentance) correctional residents. From 2000 to 2005 the % of prisoners over 55 years of age increased 33% while the overall population increased by only 8%.
While society certainly needs to do something about drug users ... I personally don't think doling out life sentances to 20 year olds who were dumb enough to get addicted to drugs is a particularly efficient or effective strategy.
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This may sound insane to many who've not spent time outside our borders but the US is one the the most moral countries in the world. The average American has absolutely no clue how normal and everyday, corruption and bribery are elsewhere. It's part of daily life. Was once in a small country in the eighties, where if you wanted to get something (not illegal) through customs you had to walk around handing out money like you were Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne in Aspen.
You simply cannot compare incarceration rates of countries like Russia to ours. The people incarcerated in Russia are the petty crooks and the political outcasts. The Russian mafia is HUGE. The truly bad guys are protected and will never see prosecution.
We all hear stories about a prosecutors son or nephew getting away with crimes and we talk about it because it's scandalous. In foreign countries it's not scandalous, it's the norm. Nobody's embarrassed by it and nobody loses their job over it when it comes to light.
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The more prisoners you have, the more correctional jobs and construction jobs you have, plus it keeps the ranks of the unemployed down by removing potential non-workers from the system and leaving jobs that need to be filled by the un-incarcerated. It's a big public works issue. No sense closing all those prisons just because other crime rates are going down. Besides, with non-violent drug offenders becoming the norm for prisoners those jobs are much more attractive.
It's a joke. The war on drugs is ridiculous and wasteful. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on it and I can still go down to the corner or make 2 phone calls and get anything I want.
All we do is drive up the price that terrorist orgs can make supplying drugs and provide law-enforcement and penitentiary gigs on taxpayer dime. Oh yeah, and get innocent people around the world - and right here at home - killed.
We have 500,000 people in prison who don't need to be there, many of whom are there for life while murderers are eligible for early release due to prison over-crowding and they are not.
We can talk about Russian gulags and shooting people in the street, but is the velvet glove of our ridiculous drug war somehow more clean or just?
Being quieter and less immediately lethal doesn't make its destruction any less.
/rant
~G
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The fact that the U.S. can't get control of its drug problem isn't really the fault of the judicial system.
Given the beliefs of our populace, that drug use isn't really all that bad, and given an antiquated jail system, I can't imagine what could be done to correct it. But that's just me.
I never liked jails anyway. It's one of the worst forms of punishment, IMHO. It serves as an ineffective deterrent, and yet jail is cruel. That's a bad combination.