Interesting graphs and charts department

[classicman]

Originally Posted by Flint

There's a great song about the shocking rise in prison populations.

I tried - If I want to be screamed at for that length of time, I'll just call my ex-wife.

[Gravdigr]

[Gravdigr]

[Lamplighter]

Yet again, Grav...

[Beest]

One in six American adults is a binge drinker, consuming alcohol in excess about four times a month,...
The study — which defines binge drinking as five or more drinks in a short period of time for men and four or more for women....
Wisconsin is the state with the most binge drinkers at 25 percent of the population

\

Five drinks - LOL

Percentage of Americans that are lightweights - 83%

[classicman]

What happened in 1980 - Privatization or what?

[Lamplighter]

Ronald Reagan

[classicman]

yeh, I got that much ... and?

[Pico and ME]

Is that when the war on drugs started?

[Lamplighter]

From Classic's graph link in Wikipedia...

Marijuana constitutes almost half of all drug arrests, and between 1990–2002, marijuana accounted for 82% of the increase in the number of drug arrests . In 2004, approximately 12.7% of state prisoners and 12.4% of Federal prisoners were serving time for a marijuana-related offense.[53]

The practice of imposing longer prison sentences on repeat offenders is common in many countries, but the Three strike laws in the U.S., which mandate 25 year imprisonment and were implemented in many states in the 1990s, is very extreme in comparison with most European countries. During the first 9 years after Nixon coined the expression War on Drugs, statistics show only a minor increase in the total number of imprisoned which implies that some factor other than the declaration of "war" is the primary contributor to the incarceration rate.

Reagan, as Governor of Calif pushed the de-institutionalization of patients with mental illness...
proposing instead they be treated in their local communities with the State providing funds.
The funding never happened.
Then, as President, this de-institutionalization program spread across the nation.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

From Classic's graph link in Wikipedia...



Reagan, as Governor of Calif pushed the de-institutionalization of patients with mental illness...
proposing instead they be treated in their local communities with the State providing funds.
The funding never happened.
Then, as President, this de-institutionalization program spread across the nation.

Not to defend the resultant lack of care, but we cannot gloss over what those institutions were and occasionally still are. Abuse and neglect were rampant the system needed to be bulldozed not tweaked. Even today the institutionalized mentally ill suffer at the hands of insensitive, sometimes abusive, poorly trained staff. My SiL is trying to cleanup one such public facility in NYS. You would not believe how many workers are on administrative leave when they should have been fired and maybe prosecuted. Cuomo is rightfully pissed about it.

Oh and legalize it. You know, if Obama put a legalization plank down, I'd be back on board in a heartbeat. Hell I might even put a election sign by the road.

[Lamplighter]

Griff, I'm in agreement with you for the most part.

When the movement for de-institutionalizationi was beginning,
I was completely on-board... as were most of the families of the patients.

When Reagan became Governor in Calif, and was a good spokesman for the need
to do something about the care of the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled
(at that time called mentally retarded)

The disaster came because Reagan sold the policy based on promises
to continue the State $ in the form of "community service",
such as Group Homes, increased numbers of Case Workers, and health care and meds, etc.
But then once the institutions were emptied, he dried up or never even made available as promised.
His budgets for community care of these people shriveled.
When he became President, he followed the same path with Federal funds.

So we have what we have... high rates of mental illness among the homeless,
and the abuse of the homeless is out of sight, except to law enforcement,
and Case Workers with impossible case loads.
A thousand points of (flickering and dim or dark) lights.

Reagan is portrayed as a hero by the Republicans, but it's a superficial and mythical image.
Ummm...., but then the military did get it's 600-ship Navy.
.

[classicman]

That seems to be a big part of it P&M...

Much of that surge is the result of public policy, such as the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing. Nearly 1 in 4 of the inmates in federal and state prisons are there because of drug-related offenses, most of them nonviolent.
Narcotic-related arrests

New drug policies have especially affected incarceration rates for women, which have increased at nearly double the rate for men since 1980. Nearly 1 in 3 women in prison today are serving sentences for drug-related crimes.

[classicman]

A major cause of such high numbers is the length of the prison sentences in the United States. One of the criticisms of the United States system is that it has much longer sentences than any other part of the world. The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years, compared to other developed countries around the world where a first time offense would warrant at most 6 months in jail.[16] Mandatory sentencing prohibits judges from using their discretion and forces them to place longer sentences on nonviolent offenses than they normally would do.

bold mine

[ZenGum]

Regarding the politicians who wrote those laws, were they being lobbied by the owners of private prisons, perhaps?


Minor point - the graph suggests the growth in prison population has slowed since 2000, but the last column is only from 2000 to 2006, but is still drawn as wide as the other ten-year columns. Probably growth has continued at the same rate.