[quote name='forsandifs' timestamp='1306877607' post='4818039']
[quote name='Jacob Jingle' timestamp='1306877344' post='4818036']Are America's prisons filled with shoplifters? I don't know the real number, but I would imagine the number of nonviolent offenders that are locked up would be a really small majority(and most of them probably have a history of past violence).
http://en.wikipedia....onviolent_crime
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Extremely biased and doesn't really give us the whole story. (Just because somebody is locked up for a nonviolent crime doesn't mean they're not a violent person. After all, AL Capone went to jail for tax evasion)
Isn't it something like 96% of criminals plea bargain their cases to lesser offenses?
Do these numbers from this wiki article factor this in? Does it factor in things like eyewitnesses refusing to press charges(common poor neighborhoods) and the courts being forced to go with lesser convictions? Do these numbers factor in a past history of violence? What does it classify as a nonviolent crime? (The author of that wiki article was clearly trying to spoon feed selective data to readers so that they would convert to his way of thinking)
Cheers,
Jacob Jingle
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I think that you are forgetting to take into account how the justice system is supposed to work.
First, a comment that suggests that people in prison are probably violent offenders because they're in prison is circular and biased. It's unreasonable to assume that a given person is violent based on the fact that they are in prison even though it wasn't a violent crime that put them there. There are plenty of con artists in jail who aren't also armed robbers. Besides, being a violent person isn't the same as being a criminal. Jails are for criminals, not just whoever happens to have X trait.
The justice system sends people to jail if they are guilty, or if a jury of their peers thinks that they are guilty based on a presentation of the evidence. The fact that a person perhaps can't (or simply isn't) convicted of one crime doesn't mean that they should be sent to jail for a proxy crime, and then punished as though they were in fact convicted of the first (unproven) crime. The standard is supposed to be high to prevent innocent people from being imprisoned.
Your guess of how many cases result in the defendant pleading to a lesser charge is irrelevant, both to prison population composition and in general. Pleas don't so much change the nature of the charges as they change the degree. You might go from first degree murder to third, perhaps. You're still classified as a violent offender. A DA might drop a violent charge altogether, but not for no reason; it's either because the case is relatively weak or the defendant has something to trade which will result in reducing crime further. A 35% sentence reduction isn't the same as a murderer suddenly being classified as a non-violent offender.
As for your questioning of the numbers, I have to point out that incarceration rates have increased the most (as per Hodgman's excellent graph) while the violent crime rate has decreased. Make of that correlation what you will, but the proportion of violent offenders in jail is definitely going to decrease if more people than ever before are jailed while violent crime rates fall. Any hard-line fantasies of a justice system hiding violence through re-definition doesn't hold up-- there just isn't any other way for those numbers to go together. Please note that the crime rate is independent of the conviction rate for those crimes.
Also, wikipedia makes it incredibly easy to figure out what its information does and does not take into account. The citations are right there, awaiting your review. Don't impugn the article because you assume that the data is misused while you don't bother to look at it. Especially when you're accusing the author(s) of being deceitful in presenting selected evidence when you yourself provide no evidence at all, but rather prejudice and conjecture to accomplish the same end as you attribute to the accused.
