It’s sometimes hard to determine the REAL cost of things.
The United States has the world’s highest rate of jail incarceration, perhaps because the private the private prisons springing up across the country provide local jobs. But if the prison population shrank to what it was twenty years ago, we could spend more money PREVENTING crime, rather than guarding convicted criminals.
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When we’re searching for simply-styled, low-cost furniture, fixtures and accessories, many of us head for Ikea. But there’s something most of us don’t know: This Swedish company originally used East German prisoners who were incarcerated for their political beliefs, to create these products.
In the November 16th edition of the Guardian, Kate Connolly reports that "a roomful of angry former GDR prisoners first watched–and then started to vent decades worth of anger–as a squirming (Ikea CEO) Peter Betzel formally apologized for using prison labor in the 1970s and 1980s."
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Justice is different in different countries. In Mexico, they don’t feed you in prison–if your family doesn’t bring you food, you’ll starve. US prison conditions vary, but our sentences are long compared to prison sentences in Europe or Scandinavia. We may not be feeling too lenient after the recent movie theater massacre by the alleged shooter James Holmes, but maybe it’s something we should pay attention to.
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A national registry has compiled a list of over 2,000 wrong convictions since 1989, since DNA testing became common. And reevaluation of old DNA testing is freeing innocent people from jail every day.
In the May 21st edition of the Los Angeles Times, David G. Savage quotes law professor Samuel Gross as saying, "The more we learn about false convictions, the better we’ll be at preventing them."
To the surprise of many prosecutors and judges, the new National Registry of Exonerations has revealed that a significant number of convicted rapists and murderers are innocent. The Innocence Project in New York says DNA alone has freed 289 prisoners since 1989.
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