E-mail from a Friend

I got an e-mail from a friend today, a Canadian JET who makes some interesting points about the comparative prison system in the US, Japan and Canada. I thought it deserved a larger audience, so I'm posting it here. Here it is:

Doing my usual surfing and found some interesting stuff regarding Bush and the job situation in the States. The author also makes some interesting connections between the guards at the prison in Iraq and their lives prior to entering into the military.

"But the main purpose of the “Yes, American Can” bus tour, of course, was to shift the attention of U.S. voters away from the Iraq prison scandal toward safer ground: the recovering job market. According to a U.S. Labor Department Report, 288,000 jobs were created in April. Bush’s campaign has seized on these numbers to further cast John Kerry as the dour New England pessimist, always droning on with the bad news. Bush, on the other hand, is the bouncy Texan optimist, always flashing an easy smile and a thumbs-up. “The president has to make sure that we’re optimistic and confident in order for jobs to be created,” he told a carefully screened crowd in Dubuque, Iowa.

Some jobs, however, are more responsive than others to the power of positive presidential thinking. More than 82 per cent of the jobs created in April were in service industries, including restaurants and retail, while the biggest new employers were temp agencies. Over the past year, 272,00 manufacturing jobs have been lost. No wonder the President’s Economic Report in February floated the idea of reclassifying fast-food restaurants as factories. “When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a ‘service’ or is it combining inputs to ‘manufacture’ a product?” the report asks.

But not all of the job growth in the U.S. has come from burger flipping and temping. With more than 2-million Americans behind bars (one of the ways unemployment stats are kept artificially low), the number of prison guards has exploded ­ from 270,317 in 2000 to 476,000 in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Watching Bush give the thumbs up in the face of so much economic misery put me in mind of a certain widely circulated photograph taken in Iraq. There are Specialist Charles Graner and Private Lynndie England, the happy couple, standing above a pile of tortured Iraqi inmates, grinning and giving the double thumbs up. Everything is fine, their eyes seem to be saying, just don't look down."

The reference to prisons perked my interest in how Japan, Canada and the US compare in prison populations. The difference is staggering - 730/100,000 in the States, 115/100,000 in Canada and a lowly 37/100,000 in Japan. The incarceration rate is dropping by about 3% per year in Canada while it is increasing by the same amount in the US. Also, California has built about 21 prisons in the last 15 years compared to just 1 university with increases to the education and prison budgets also being similar in their disparity. Sounds like you should retrain for a job as a prison guard!