The US is the world's largest prison state

The US is the world's largest prison state The US is the world's largest prison state, imprisoning more of its citizens than any nation on earth, both in absolute numbers,http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poptotal and proportionally.http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2011/03/06/worlds-largest-jailer-by-far-its-not-even-close/ It imprisons people for longer periods of time, more mercilessly, and for more trivial transgressions than any nation in the west. This sprawling penal state has been constructed over decades, by both political parties, and it punishes the poor and racial minorities at overwhelmingly disproportionate rates.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 American Law and the Legal System By Van Dervort, Thomas (Google Affiliate Ad) But not everyone is subjected to that system of penal harshness. It all changes radically when the nation's most powerful actors are caught breaking the law. With few exceptions, they are gifted not merely with leniency, but full-scale immunity from criminal punishment. Thus have the most egregious crimes of the last decade been fully shielded from prosecution when committed by those with the greatest political and economic power: the construction of a worldwide torture regime, spying on Americans' communications without the warrants required by criminal law by government agencies and the telecom industry, an aggressive war launched on false pretenses, and massive, systemic financial fraud in the banking and credit industry that triggered the 2008 financial crisis. This two-tiered justice system was the subject of , "With Liberty and Justice for Some", and what was most striking to me as I traced the recent history of this phenomenon is how explicit it has become. Obviously, those with money and power always enjoyed substantial advantages in the US justice system, but lip service was at least always paid to the core precept of the rule of law: that - regardless of power, position and prestige - all stand equal before the blindness of Lady Justice. The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System by Barton, Benjamin (Google Affiliate Ad) It really is the case that this principle is now not only routinely violated, as was always true, but explicitly repudiated, right out in the open. It is commonplace to hear US elites unblinkingly insisting that those who become sufficiently important and influential are - and should be - immunized from the system of criminal punishment to which everyone else is subjected. Worse, we are constantly told that immunizing those with the greatest power is not for their good, but for our good, for our collective good: because it's better for all of us if society is free of the disruptions that come from trying to punish the most powerful, if we're free of the deprivations that we would collectively experience if we lose their extraordinary value and contributions by prosecuting them. This rationale was popularized in 1974 when Gerald Ford explained why Richard Nixon - who built his career as a "law-and-order" politician demanding harsh punishments and unforgiving prosecutions for ordinary criminals - would never see the inside of a courtroom after being caught committing multiple felonies; his pardon was for the good not of Nixon, but of all of us. That was the same reasoning hauled out to justify immunity for officials of the National Security State who tortured and telecom giants who illegally spied on Americans (we need them to keep us safe and can't disrupt them with prosecutions), as well as the refusal to prosecute any Wall Street criminals for their fraud (prosecutions for these financial crimes would disrupt our collective economic recovery).An Introduction to the American Legal System By Scheb, John M. (Google Affiliate Ad) A new episode unveiled on Tuesday is one of the most vivid examples yet of this mentality. Over the last year, federal investigators found that one of the world's largest banks, HSBC, spent years committing serious crimes, involving money laundering for terrorists; "facilitat[ing] money laundering by Mexican drug cartels"; and "mov[ing] tainted money for Saudi banks tied to terrorist groups". Those investigations uncovered substantial evidence "that senior bank officials were complicit in the illegal activity." As but one example, "an HSBC executive at one point argued that the bank should continue working with the Saudi Al Rajhi bank, which has supported Al Qaeda." The Most Dangerous Branch: The Judicial Assault on American Culture by (Google Affiliate Ad) Needless to say, these are the kinds of crimes for which ordinary and powerless people are prosecuted and imprisoned with the greatest aggression possible. If you're Muslim and your conduct gets anywhere near helping a terrorist group, even by accident, you're going to prison for a long, long time. In fact, powerless, obscure, low-level employees are routinely sentenced to long prison terms for engaging in relatively petty money laundering schemes, unrelated to terrorism, and on a scale that is a tiny fraction of what HSBC and its senior officials are alleged to have done. But not HSBC. On Tuesday, not only did the US Justice Department announce that HSBC would not be criminally prosecuted, but outright claimed that the reason is that they are too important, too instrumental to subject them to such disruptions. In other words, shielding them from the system of criminal sanction to which the rest of us are subject is not for their good, but for our common good. We should not be angry, but grateful, for the extraordinary gift bestowed on the global banking giant: "US authorities defended their decision not to prosecute HSBC for accepting the tainted money of rogue states and drug lords on Tuesday, insisting that a $1.9bn fine for a litany of offences was preferable to the 'collateral consequences' of taking the bank to court. . . . America's Correctional Crisis: Prison Populations and Public Policy by (Google Affiliate Ad) "Announcing the record fine at a press conference in New York, assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer said that despite HSBC"s 'blatant failure' to implement anti-money laundering controls and its wilful flouting of US sanctions, the consequences of a criminal prosecution would have been dire. "Had the US authorities decided to press criminal charges, HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking licence in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilised. Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor by Herivel, Tara/ Wri (Google Affiliate Ad) "HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, said it was 'profoundly sorry' for what it called 'past mistakes' that allowed terrorists and narcotics traffickers to move billions around the financial system and circumvent US banking laws. . . . "As part of the deal, HSBC has undertaken a five-year agreement with the US department of justice under which it will install an independent monitor to assess reformed internal controls. The bank's top executives will defer part of their bonuses for the whole of the five-year period, while bonuses have been clawed back from a number of former and current executives, including those in the US directly involved at the time. "John Coffee, a professor of law at Columbia Law School in New York, said the fine was consistent with how US regulators have been treating bank infractions in recent years. 'These days they rarely sue individuals in any meaningful way when the entity will settle. This is largely a function of resource constraints, but also risk aversion, and a willingness to take the course of least resistance,' he said." DOJ officials touted the $1.9 billion fine HSBC would pay, the largest ever for such a case. As the Guardian's Nils Pratley noted, "the sum represents about four weeks' earnings given the bank's pre-tax profits of $21.9bn last year." Unsurprisingly, "the steady upward progress of HSBC's share price since the scandal exploded in July was unaffected on Tuesday morning."The Enemy in Our Hands: America's Treatment of Enemy Prisoners of War (Google Affiliate Ad) The New York Times Editors this morning announced: "It is a dark day for the rule of law." There is, said the NYT editors, "no doubt that the wrongdoing at HSBC was serious and pervasive." But the bank is simply too big, too powerful, too important to prosecute. That's not merely a dark day for the rule of law. It's a wholesale repudiation of it. The US government is expressly saying that banking giants reside outside of - above - the rule of law, that they will not be punished when they get caught red-handed committing criminal offenses for which ordinary people are imprisoned for decades. Aside from the grotesque injustice, the signal it sends is as clear as it is destructive: you are free to commit whatever crimes you want without fear of prosecution. And obviously, if the US government would not prosecute these banks on the ground that they're too big and important, it would - yet again, or rather still - never let them fail. But this case is the opposite of an anomaly. That the most powerful actors should be immunized from the rule of law - not merely treated better, but fully immunized - is a constant, widely affirmed precept in US justice. It's applied to powerful political and private sector actors alike. Over the past four years, the CIA and NSA have received the same gift, as have top Executive Branch officials, as has the telecom industry, as has most of the banking industry. This is how I described it in "With Liberty and Justice for Some": ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "To hear our politicians and our press tell it, the conclusion is inescapable: we're far better off when political and financial elites - and they alone - are shielded from criminal accountability. "It has become a virtual consensus among the elites that their members are so indispensable to the running of American society that vesting them with immunity from prosecution - even for the most egregious crimes - is not only in their interest but in our interest, too. Prosecutions, courtrooms, and prisons, it's hinted - and sometimes even explicitly stated - are for the rabble, like the street-side drug peddlers we occasionally glimpse from our car windows, not for the political and financial leaders who manage our nation and fuel our prosperity. "It is simply too disruptive, distracting, and unjust, we are told, to subject them to the burden of legal consequences." That is precisely the rationale explicitly invoked by DOJ officials to justify their decision to protect HSBC from criminal accountability. These are the same officials who previously immunized Bush-era torturers and warrantless eavesdroppers, telecom giants, and Wall Street executives, even as they continue to persecute whistleblowers at record rates and prosecute ordinary citizens - particularly poor and minorities - with extreme harshness even for trivial offenses. The administration that now offers the excuse that HSBC is too big to prosecute is the same one that quite consciously refused to attempt to break up these banks in the aftermath of the "too-big-to-fail" crisis of 2008, as former TARP overseer Neil Barofsky, among others, has spent years arguing. And, of course, these HSBC-protectors in the Obama DOJ are the same officials responsible for maintaining and expanding what NYT Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal has accurately described as "essentially a separate justice system for Muslims," one in which "the principle of due process is twisted and selectively applied, if it is applied at all." What has been created is not so much a "two-tiered justice system" as a multi-tiered one, entirely dependent on the identity of the alleged offender rather than the crimes of which they are accused. Having different "justice systems" for citizens based on their status, wealth, power and prestige is exactly what the US founders argued most strenuously had to be avoided (even as they themselves maintained exactly such a system). But here we have in undeniable clarity not merely proof of exactly how this system functions, but also the rotted and fundamentally corrupt precept on which it's based: that some actors are simply too important and too powerful to punish criminally. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned in 2010, exempting the largest banks from criminal prosecution has meant that lawlessness and "venality" is now "at a higher level" in the US even than that which prevailed in the pervasively corrupt and lawless privatizing era in Russia. Having the US government act specially to protect the most powerful factions, particularly banks, was a major impetus that sent people into the streets protesting both as part of the early Tea Party movement as well as the Occupy movement. As well as it should: it is truly difficult to imagine corruption and lawlessness more extreme than having the government explicitly place the most powerful factions above the rule of law even as it continues to subject everyone else to disgracefully harsh "justice". If this HSBC gift makes more manifest this radical corruption, then it will at least have achieved some good. UPDATE By coincidence, on the very same day that the DOJ announced that HSBC would not be indicted for its multiple money-laundering felonies, the New York Times published a story featuring the harrowing story of an African-American single mother of three who was sentenced to life imprisonment at the age of 27 for a minor drug offense: "Stephanie George and Judge Roger Vinson had quite different opinions about the lockbox seized by the police from her home in Pensacola. She insisted she had no idea that a former boyfriend had hidden it in her attic. Judge Vinson considered the lockbox, containing a half-kilogram of cocaine, to be evidence of her guilt. "But the defendant and the judge fully agreed about the fairness of the sentence he imposed in federal court. "'Even though you have been involved in drugs and drug dealing,' Judge Vinson told Ms. George, 'your role has basically been as a girlfriend and bag holder and money holder but not actively involved in the drug dealing, so certainly in my judgment it does not warrant a life sentence.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Yet the judge had no other option on that morning 15 years ago. As her stunned family watched, Ms. George, then 27, who had never been accused of violence, was led from the courtroom to serve a sentence of life without parole. "'I remember my mom crying out and asking the Lord why,' said Ms. George, now 42, in an interview at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee. 'Sometimes I still can't believe myself it could happen in America.'" As the NYT notes - and read her whole story to get the full flavor of it - this is commonplace for the poor and for minorities in the US justice system. Contrast that deeply oppressive, merciless punishment system with the full-scale immunity bestowed on HSBC - along with virtually every powerful and rich lawbreaking faction in America over the last decade - and that is the living, breathing two-tiered US justice system. How this glaringly disparate, and explicitly status-based, treatment under the criminal law does not produce serious social unrest is mystifying, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Entire world - Prison Population Totals welcome to the home of the prison system AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL , United States of America 2,239,751 , China 1,640,000 , Russian Federation 701,900 , Brazil 549,577 , India 372,296 , Mexico 239,941 , Thailand 234,633 , Iran 217,000 , South Africa 156,659 , Ukraine 147,112 , Indonesia 141,981 , Turkey 138,016 , Colombia 113,884 , Vietnam 113,018 , Ethiopia 112,361 , Philippines 104,710 , Poland 84,156 , United Kingdom: England & Wales 83,999 , Pakistan c.77,800 , Japan 69,876 , Spain 68,608 , France 67,225 , Taiwan 66,163 , Egypt c.66,000 , Italy 65,905 , Germany 65,889 , Morocco 65,279 , Bangladesh 64,255 , Myanmar (formerly Burma) 60,053 , Peru 59,451 , Argentina 59,227 , Rwanda 58,461 , Cuba 57,337 , Algeria 56,000 , Nigeria 54,156 , Kenya 52,000 , Kazakhstan 51,593 , Venezuela 50,000 , Saudi Arabia 49,000 , Chile 46,982 , Republic of (South) Korea 44,731 , Uzbekistan c.42,000 , Belarus 41,525 , Canada 38,691 , Iraq 37,920 , Malaysia 37,157 , Azerbaijan 36,891 , Tanzania 36,552 , Uganda 34,000 Romania 31,925 , Australia 29,383 , El Salvador 26,639 , Afghanistan 24,613 , Cameroon 23,368 , Czech Republic 22,992 , Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) c.22,000 , Georgia 21,425 , Sri Lanka 21,216 , Tunisia 21,000 , Dominican Republic 20,969 , Sudan 20,000 , Angola 19,898 , Madagascar 19,870 , Israel 17,700 , Hungary 17,210 , Zambia c.17,000 , Mozambique 16,881 , Cambodia 15,065 , Zimbabwe c.15,000 , Costa Rica 14,963 , Panama 14,238 , Nepal c.14,000 , Portugal 13,754 , Netherlands 13,749 , Ghana 13,467 , Guatemala 12,835 , Greece 12,586 , Singapore 12,555 , Honduras 12,336 , Malawi 12,033 , Ecuador 11,800 , Bolivia 11,516 , Puerto Rico (USA) 11,452 , Yemen 11,313 , United Arab Emirates 11,193 , Cote d'Ivoire 11,143 , Serbia 11,094 , Slovakia 11,092 , Belgium 10,974 , Bulgaria 10,961 , Turkmenistan 10,953 , Syria 10,599 , Burundi 10,389 , Lithuania 9,920 , Kyrgyzstan 9,828 , Uruguay 9,450 , Tajikistan 9,317 , Hong Kong (China) 9,232 , Austria 8,694 , New Zealand 8,623 , Mongolia 8,193 , South Sudan c.8,000 , United Kingdom: Scotland 7,735 , Senegal 7,300 , Nicaragua c.7,200 , Haiti 7,009 , Niger c.7,000 , Benin 6,908 , Moldova (Republic of) 6,693 , Sweden 6,669 , Latvia 6,561 , Paraguay 6,300 , Jordan 6,066 , Switzerland 6,065 , Mali 5,817 ,Lebanon 5,100 , Croatia 5,064 , Botswana c.5,063 , Burkina Faso 4,837 , Chad 4,831 , Armenia 4,812 , Albania 4,779 , Jamaica 4,500 , Namibia 4,314 , Ireland, Republic of 4,275 , Kuwait 4,179 , Papua New Guinea 4,134 , Laos 4,020 , Republic of Guinea c.4,000 , Togo 3,844 , Denmark 3,829 , Swaziland c.3,764 , Norway 3,575 , Trinidad and Tobago 3,500 , Estonia 3,266 , Finland 3,214 , Libya 3,186 , Somalia 2,900 , Gabon c.2,750 , Sierra Leone 2,537 , Mauritius 2,354 , Macedonia (former Yugoslav Republic of) 2,300 , Lesotho 2,243 , Guyana 1,962 , Bosnia and Herzegovina: Federation 1,819 , United Kingdom: Northern Ireland 1,785 , Mauritania 1,695 , Liberia 1,601 , Fiji 1,537 , Kosovo/Kosova c.1,450 , Slovenia 1,412 , Oman 1,403 , Congo (Brazzaville) c.1,400 , Montenegro 1,350 , Belize 1,324 , Bahamas 1,300 , Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) 1,226 , Qatar c.1,150 , Reunion (France) 1,127 , Bahrain 1,100 , Macau (China) 1,083 , Bosnia and Herzegovina: Republika Srpska 1,054 , Barbados 1,032 , Suriname 1,010 , Bhutan 1,001 , Gambia c.1,000 , Maldives c.1,000 , Martinique (France) 954 , Cyprus (Republic of) 900 , Central African Republic 845 , Guadeloupe (France) 768 , Djibouti 750 , Luxembourg 660 , French Guiana/Guyane (France) 654 , Seychelles 593 , Virgin Islands (U.S.A.) 587 , Guam (USA) 585 , Malta 580 , St. Lucia 554 , Curaçao (Netherlands) 502 , Brunei Darussalam 427 , Samoa (formerly Western Samoa) 427 , French Polynesia (France) 426 , St. Vincent and the Grenadines 424 , New Caledonia (France) 423 , Grenada 419 , Antigua and Barbuda 361 , St. Kitts and Nevis 344 , Bermuda (United Kingdom) 271 , Solomon Islands 262 , Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor) 260 , Aruba (Netherlands) 246 , Dominica 242 , Mayotte (France) 214 , Cayman Islands (United Kingdom) 212 , Greenland (Denmark) 194 , Vanuatu 191 , Sao Tome e Principe 185 , American Samoa (USA) 167 , Jersey (United Kingdom) 165 , Northern Mariana Islands (USA) , 162 Tonga 158 , Iceland 152 , St. Maarten (Netherlands) 138 , Virgin Islands (United Kingdom) 138 , Comoros c.130 , Kiribati 124 , Guernsey (United Kingdom) 114 , Isle of Man (United Kingdom) 105 , Micronesia, Federated States of 95 , Anguilla (United Kingdom) 76 , Palau 73 , Gibraltar (United Kingdom) 70 , Guinea Bissau 64 , Andorra 42 , Marshall Islands 41 , Cook Islands (New Zealand) 25 , Nauru 20 , Monaco 12 , Tuvalu 12 , Liechtenstein 11 , Faeroe Islands (Denmark) 8