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The Republic:

Exploding prison populations in the US serve a basic need of capitalism, at the expense usually of Blacks

The business of keeping people in cages is not a pretty one. While bodies pile up on Vancouver streets and as dealers fight over the drug war's lucrative spoils, our politicians and corporate media look to jails as a solution. But we need only look south of the border to see what sort of solution corrections offers.

The United States now has far and away the highest proportion of population under correctional control in the world.

In 2003, a report by The Sentencing Project's Mark Mauer reported that internationally, the rate of incarceration per 100,000 people was 702 in the US, 620 in Russia and 400 in South Africa, and the rates fell quickly from there. Writing in 2008, Adam Liptak counted 2.3 million people in US jails, while second place China, with a much larger population, had "only" 1.6 million in jail. Read more »

New Scientist:

During the dreary dry days of Prohibition, some Americans were prepared to
go to any lengths to get a beer. Not least the nation's doctors - not for
themselves, of course, but for their patients, some of whom were in
desperate need of a drink. Faced with restrictions on medicinal whisky and a
ban on prescribing beer, even doctors who never touched the stuff and didn't
believe there were any benefits from booze joined the battle for "medical
beer". Many didn't care about the beer: this fight was about a doctor's
right to decide what was best for their patients

ON 26 September 1922, New Yorker John Davin launched his campaign for
election to Congress. Davin was no politician, but a doctor who had
practised in the city for 40 years and was at the very top of his
profession. That profession now faced a threat so grave that Davin and
like-minded doctors felt compelled to put their case before the people. They Read more »

SOFT ON ONE SIDE, HARD ON THE OTHER

G. D. Maxwell
Wed, 25 Mar 2009
Pique Newsmagazine (CN BC)

So, you're in a dark alley on the wrong side of town. Which town? Doesn't really matter all that much but let's say Surrey, where even the right side of town - assuming there is one - can be scary depending on which side of the road you're trying to dodge erratic drivers on. But back to that dark alley where images of wanton, random gang violence fill your head, largely because you've been watching too much local television news and listening to Rear-Entry Campbell and John van Dongen's tough words on gang violence. Read more »

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb's interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession. After decades of mindless "tough-on-crime" hysteria, an increasingly irrational "drug war," and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan -- and virtually every other country in the world -- to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history." Read more »