'Lock em up' or are there alternatives to incarceration?

Hi gang

Responding to a comment I left on the Wesley Snipes thread, Erasmus Folly PMed me with a link to an article in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us...gewanted=print

Basically the article informs us ...

• The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
• Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
• The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, ...
• The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
• There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.
• The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.
• The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.
• People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, ...
• Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well.

In Australia too the prisons are over crowded and filled with people who have committed relatively minor crimes. I would like to see serious crimes being dealt with harsher sentences and the less severe being given more of a community service type of penalty and possibly combined with a house arrest scenario with regular alcohol/drug testing.

This would free up the prison resources for the 'hard cases' and society would benefit with the charities and welfare organisations who usually rely on volunteer assistance, receiving a 'compulsory' work force.

Obviously the reason for prisons is to punish, however rehabilitation should also be an important factor because most criminals end up released and sadly in too many cases a high level of recidivism occurs.


Any thoughts?

__________________

OK nothing yet, maybe not a topic to discuss ... However maybe it is and I've just gone about it the wrong ay.

So another approach may be to discuss recent cases ... Just heard this on the news ... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7369851.stm

Basically in Austria there was a father who kept his daughter locked up in the cellar for 24 years. He had 7 children with her. He is now 73.

What would be the appropriate punishment for this?

Lock him up for the rest of his life?
Institutionalise him under psychiatric care?
Execution?

Read about this recently and it seems this is just the tip of the iceberg, as if it alone were not bad enough.

If found guilty I say lock him up for 24 years, if he is still alive when its all said and done then cool, let him out.

Tax evasion should just be pay up or work it off untill you do pay up.

Just my two cents. Wait give that back I need it for gas.

__________________

“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton