Land of the free. Guardian of liberty around the world. Home of the Great Emancipator. Most significant secular holiday is Independence Day. Free speech, free press, free, free, FREE! YAY AMERICA!

Woohoo.

"An explosion in inmate numbers in recent years means that although the US makes up 5% of the total global population, it now accounts for 25% of the world's prisoners." - BBC News

The first time I heard such a thing I recall muttering a Scooby Doo-ish "wtf?" My country accounts for 1/4 of all prisoners in the world? But we only make up (300 million/6.5 billion=) 4.6% of the world's population! Time to break out Google....sigh...its true. The USA has a higher proportion of its own citizens locked up than communist China. Please stop reading for a moment to allow your dominant paradigm to adjust.

There are 1,421,911 prisoners held in Federal and State prisons as well as another 713,990 in local jails. All together way over 2,000,000 people are locked up right now.

Why?

Well, it seems that 1.1 million are there for nonviolent crimes. An hour or so spent researching this reveals that while the rates for violent and other crimes are down, drug arrests are up.

"About 1.3 million of the current jail population have been imprisoned for non-violent crimes, usually drug offences." - BBC News

Prison is a harsh consequence and should be reserved for harsh crimes. Killing a deer out of season for food isn't a harsh crime, yet many have wound up in jail for it. Same thing for wearing a T-shirt, smoking a joint, drinking a beer, or just having the music up too loud.

The authors of the Bill of Rights understood that government inherently seeks to limit personal liberty and provided a dandy list of specific freedoms upon which the government could not trample. In keeping with its natural tendencies, the government has sytematically stripped us of all liberties not listed in or derived from that list. We could drastically reduce millions of pages of complex legal jargon to a few, increase understandability of the law, and have a legal code that more accurately reflect the reality of our current system by making one change; just make everything illegal that is not specifically allowed by the Bill of Rights. Thats how it is anyway.

How free a people are we if the sum total of our freedoms can be counted on both hands? And how long will we continue to tolerate the hypocrisy?