Qi - US Prison population.

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I Love QI its such a awesome show and ive just seen this clip and i find it absolutely staggering.


The 3 strike rules seems like a terrible idea , you would think that common sense would be applied to the rulings like the examples given in the clip.
 
Soldato
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Common sense works both ways. Why would you steal something as worthless as cookies 4 times knowing you could get a life sentence?

Btw, this will probably get movied to the YouTube thread like every OP with a video does. :confused:
 
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I would be ****ed if i was the troops knowing that every helmet and body armour set had been made by unskilled prisoners :/


Especially by prisoners so dumb that when told the next crime they commit will lead to an automatic 25 year sentence get caught stealing cookies from a store.
 
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Common sense works both ways. Why would you steal something as worthless as cookies 4 times knowing you could get a life sentence?

No it's not that he stole a cookie 4 times, he committed 2 very serious crimes (they have to be serious/violent to count) then it's the 3rd crime that can be anything.

If you get caught shoplifting $10 worth of food 20 times in a row you arn't going to get life unless it was a gun point each time :p
 
Soldato
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No it's not that he stole a cookie 4 times, he committed 2 very serious crimes (they have to be serious/violent to count) then it's the 3rd crime that can be anything.

If you get caught shoplifting $10 worth of food 20 times in a row you arn't going to get life unless it was a gun point each time :p
Oh ok. lol :p
 
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No it's not that he stole a cookie 4 times, he committed 2 very serious crimes (they have to be serious/violent to count) then it's the 3rd crime that can be anything.

If you get caught shoplifting $10 worth of food 20 times in a row you arn't going to get life unless it was a gun point each time :p

I'm guessing though that they still serve prison sentences for the first 2 crimes? So that debt to society has been paid. And things like Burglary and smoking marijuana are counted in the 3 strike rule. This means you could be busted twice for smoking a joint and then steal a cookie and WHAM Life in prison.
 
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Common sense works both ways. Why would you steal something as worthless as cookies 4 times knowing you could get a life sentence?

Btw, this will probably get movied to the YouTube thread like every OP with a video does. :confused:

I don't see why this would be put in the youtube thread. It is a discussion on the 3 strike rule in america with the source of the information in video form instead of text... Its hardly a dog chasing its tail kind of video.
 
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And things like Burglary and smoking marijuana are counted in the 3 strike rule.

No, in America it has to be a violent crime.

Except in California where it can be just "serious" which with their weird laws on burglary can make for weird results.
 
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Approximately 2,700 "third strikers" received at least a 25 years-to-life sentence for nonviolent and non-serious offenses

In California, nearly 75 percent of 2nd strikes and 50 percent of 3rd strikes are for nonviolent and non-serious offenses.

Although its about california again lets not forget California by far is the most populated state in america with 11% of the population or 36million people. So its not asif this not going to affect a lot of people.
 
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There has been a massive, massive, increase in US prison numbers since the beginning of the 1980's -

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The Incarceration Boom in the United States

After 1980 something dramatic happened. The US incarceration rate started climbing, and it has continued to climb. Our current incarceration rate is approximately 450 sentenced prisoners for every 100,000 people. In contrast, most other industrialized countries resemble the United States before 1970. For particular subgroups of prisoners the picture is far worse. For African Americans the rate is just under 2000 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 population. In 1992 over half of all African-American men in Baltimore aged 18-35 on any given day were under some form of control by the criminal justice system.

...

The dramatic increase in incarceration rates cannot be explained by our crime rates. Homicide rates in the United States are much higher than those of comparable countries, but homicide convictions account for an insignificant number of sentenced prisoners. In general, other crime rates in the United States are high, but they remain in ranges that overlap with comparable rates in other countries--for example, one can point to industrialized countries with higher auto theft rates than the United States. And while there is much contested terrain about changes in U.S. crime rates since 1970, it is generally conceded that the crime rates have not changed dramatically and that movements up and down in the incarceration rate have not correlated with crime rate changes.

What has changed are policy decisions about who to lock up. Since 1980, 84 percent of the increase in State and Federal prison admissions has occurred among non-violent offenders. A third of the increase is due to incarcerating drug offenders. The United States now has a higher rate of incarceration for drug offenses than its average rate of incarceration for all offenses between 1920 and 1970.

From the late 1970s on, incarceration rates rose dramatically because prosecution and sentencing policies changed. Most of those changes involved legislative policy, but parole board actions and discretionary judicial sentencing practices also contributed to the increase In the most general sense, the attitudes reflected in those changes seem to include the beliefs that crime is rampant in the United States, that the typical criminal is violent and different from other people, and that the solution is to lock enough criminals up.

....

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HSP/is_1_3/ai_66678533/?tag=content;col1


It's a 1998 article so the rate/100,000 is far lower than the current figure.
 
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There is something very suspicious about prisons, especially when it comes down to doing work which beneifts a select few....
 
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