The Business End of the Stick

Amendment VIII:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

This is a short amendment, but it has large implications for our society.  Without getting too preachy about the numbers, take a gander at this: Worldwide Incarceration Statistics.  Please do not tell me that you think that is okay in a nation that reveres freedom as a founding principle.  Also, please do not fall away from the horror of that statistic by insisting that China probably has more people in jail than they let on, which may be true, but it actually doesn't matter because I don't want to compare my country to China when it comes to justice and human rights.  I don't care what they do, they're nasty, horrible, oppressive and all that stuff, but according to this, we're worse than them at locking people up.
So what's up? Are we inherently more criminal than other countries?  I'm thinking about comparing similar countries like the UK, Canada or Australia, which increases our shame (Canada is not even on the list in the article above, it's about 106/100K compared to 737/100K for the US).  Why on God's green earth does our northern neighbor only have 1/7th of our incarceration rate?  They have big cities, they have poverty and drug problems, what's the deal here?  It's pretty complicated, so I'm going to make a list:

1. The "War" on Drugs: Since I was a kid we have been engaged in a national struggle against illegal drugs.  Non-coincidentally, this also marks the explosion of the incarceration rates.  The terminology and the mindset we use here matters a great deal.  We have treated drugs as an enemy, and thus we have treated users, addicts, dealers and suppliers as the armies of that enemy.  I don't wish to engage in arguments about legalization or normalization of drugs here.  I am just convinced that the reason why our prisons are stuffed like a thanksgiving turkey has mostly to do with the zealous hatred inspired by the war on drugs.  We have allowed our enemy to define us and make us into precisely the sort of monster we thought we were battling in the Cold War: a state that scoops up "undesirables" and robs them of their freedom and submerges them in a dystopian "corrections" system where their chances of ever getting back to a "normal" life is practically nil.
2. Privatization of Prisons: I get it, we're a capitalist society, and since we're going to be locking up so many people, we ought to let somebody get rich off of all that wasted human potential.  It's a long standing human tradition: you fail, you lose, you break the law, you become someone else's slave or cash cow, you might as well do someone some good.  The problem is that the "corrections" system, in the best of all possible worlds, should be about rehabilitation and restoration rather than strictly about punishment.  Contracting that duty out to the low bidder, just isn't a very good idea.  It leads to what amounts to cruel and unusual punishments: poorly staffed prisons overrun with gangs, rapes, drugs and all the things you might hope would be absent from a place designed to get folk back on the right path.
3. Racism: Prisons are just full of black and brown people, at an alarmingly high rate. I'm not even going to go into more detail about this, because I'm just too sad.
4. False ideas of retribution and vengeance equaling justice: This is probably the root cause of a lot of our problems: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  We think collectively that the only way to have justice is retributive, not restorative.  Why, in 2016, do we still have capital punishment?  Why is our correctional system so out of whack?  It has to be a philosophical and fundamental problem with our approach.  We think more violence will make us safe.  We think fear of consequences will stop those who would do harm.  History has proven that both of these thoughts are fallacies.  The fact of the matter is that most of the people in the correctional system didn't start out with the intent to harm others (some of them did, so I'm not going to say we don't ever need to lock people up).  A lot of criminal journeys are simply the result of making some poor life choices, and far too many of them are related to addiction (see #1). the only solution to the problem is some very hard work of transforming our approach to dealing with crime. It's going to require a consistent focus on the criminal as a human being who is in need of restoration rather than a virus that must be quarantined and/or purged from the system.

What we have now is a blatantly unconstitutional system.  It is broken, it is cruel and unusual, it is excessive in some way at almost every turn. Justice is obviously not blind or equally applied across the socio-economic spectrum.  People who steal millions get lighter sentences than people who steal hundreds or sell a couple bags of dried leaves. Find anything in this that actually resembles justice.
It is obvious that we cannot let criminals run free in the world to harm the law abiding citizens and the innocent, but somewhere between anarchy and where we are now, there must be a place where the scales balance.