The Madness of Two Worlds

If you are poor:-

Leandro Andrade is serving a life sentence in California for stealing five videotapes from a K-Mart. He was convicted under the state's three strikes law, after convictions for petty theft, burglary, and possession of marijuana. Justice David Souter noted that Andrade "committed theft of trifling value...with no violent crimes against the person."

-Sisters Jamie and Gladys Scott received double life sentences in 1994 for an $11 armed robbery, the first criminal for either of them. They spent 17 years in jail.

As of 2003 in California there were 344 individuals serving sentences of 25 years or more for shoplifting as a third offense, in many cases after two non-violent offenses.

If you are the rich:-

The Savings and Loan fraud cost the nation between $300 billion and $500 billion, about 100 times more than the total cost of burglaries in 2010. The financial system bailout has already cost the country $3 trillion.

Goldman Sachs packaged bad debt, sold it under a different name, persuaded ratings services to label it AAA, and then bet against it by selling it short. Other firms accused of fraud and insider trading were Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Countrywide Financial, and Wells Fargo.

New York Times reported in 2008 that the Justice Department had postponed the bribery or fraud prosecutions of over 50 corporations, choosing instead to enter into agreements involving fines and 'monitoring' periods.

"The financial system led us into the crisis and it will lead us out." -- Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein.
"Western-style private enterprise...will lead the world out of the mess it led the world into." -- Chicago Tribune.
"If capitalism is perceived to not be working in America...it's because the system isn't capitalist enough." -- Rachel Marsden

From here

free the net

A British student can be extradited to the United States for running a website linking to sites carrying pirated TV shows and films, a court has ruled. Richard O'Dwyer, a 23-year-old student at Sheffield Hallam University, looked downward as district judge Quentin Purdy ruled that there were no valid reasons why he could not be sent to New York state for trial. US customs agents are seeking his prosecution over a website O'Dwyer set up when he was 19 called TVShack, and ran until his arrest last year. This provided links to other sites hosting pirated versions of TV shows and film. O'Dwyer's lawyers said the site was little different from a search engine like Google and was thus most likely not illegal under UK law.

His mother, Julia, wept "If they can come for Richard they can come for anyone."

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's assistant deputy director told the Guardian that they would now actively pursue websites similar to TVShack even if their only connection to the US was a website address ending in .com or .net. Such suffixes are routed through Verisign, an internet infrastructure company based in Virginia, which the agency believes is sufficient to seek a US prosecution.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/jan/13/tvshack-student-founder-extradition

A country in prison

For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison . Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world. According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system. The largest percentage increase — 12 percent — was in Kentucky.

The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime or in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as "three-strikes" laws, that result in longer prison stays.

The report said one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in 9 .

50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

"For all the money spent on corrections today, there hasn't been a clear and convincing return for public safety," said the Center on the State's Public Safety Performance Project director .

The United States is the world's incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.

"While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Eugene Debs

We are all criminals

Nearly two-thirds of Britons regularly break the law if they think they can get away with it, research shows.

It found : "The 'law-abiding majority' which politicians like to address, is a chimera. The law-abiding majority not only do not abide by the law, they also do not believe in the value of laws and rules, shrugging them off in pursuit of their interests and desires. They even regard law-abidingness as a disadvantage."

Professor Karstedt, said: "Contempt for the law is as widespread in the centre of society as it is assumed to be rampant at the margins and amongst specific marginal groups. Anti-social behaviour by the few is mirrored by anti-civil behaviour by the many.

Dr Stephen Farrall said : "What we find in our research is a strong tendency amongst consumers to "hit back" when they feel treated unfairly by big and small business, even by illegal means."

Socialists claim that people are neither inherently good , nor inherently bad , but will behave according to the norms of the prevailing society .

And as one of the researchers says: "The values and the behaviour of those at the centre of society are indicative of the moral state of our society"

Socialists would assert that people recognise that present society condones legalised theft and that the capitalist class maintain a privileged lifestyle whilst the rest of us endure varying degrees of poverty, both relative and absolute . The way in which wealth is produced and distributed will determine the ideas of the people; in other words, material conditions dominate and form the basis of all the legal, ethical, moral and religious superstructure of society.

"...buying and selling is the great cheat that robs and steals the earth from one another. It is that which makes some lords, others beggars, some rulers, others to be ruled; and makes great murderers and thieves to be imprisoners and hangers of little ones, or of sincere hearted men" said Gerrard Winstanley in 1649 - "A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England"

Law and crime here , here and here and here

Give a dog a bad name

All children could be required to take a test to find out if they are a risk of becoming criminals, new government proposals unveiled today say.
The government plans to "establish universal checks throughout a child's development to help service providers to identify those most at risk of offending," the report says.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said. :-
"Who, for example, can disagree with the idea of 'early intervention'? But are we talking about supporting and educating young people or bar-coding babies at birth?"

Neera Sharma, the principal policy officer at the chuildren's charity Barnardos said:-

"If this means that parents might get early help and support, if it means that issues such as poor school attendance were to be addressed, this has the potential to reduce crime and keep young people out of trouble. But if a child is identified as at risk, is that family going to get the support it needs? The danger could be that they are labelled and they live up to the expectations of them. There is a risk of stigmatising the child."