America, With the Largest Prison System in the World, Does a Miserable Job

Interesting that I had to go to the BBC in England to find this. Not unusual, however (sigh).

About the same time that President Bush was condemning the abuse of prisoners in Iraq as un-American, a year-long inquiry began into the mistreatment of prisoners at home.

The Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons (CSAAP) issues its final report in about eight weeks time, but the testimony of violence, abuse and over-crowding it has already heard has shocked few familiar with the largest documented prison system in the world.

More than 2.1 million people are in jail in the US at any one time; that is about one in 140 Americans, or as many people as live in Namibia, or nearly five Luxembourgs - and it is a number that continues to rise.

One of the biggest drivers of the expanding population are the tough policies brought in over the last 20 years to tackle high crime rates - like the "three strikes" laws that hand out long, mandatory sentences to repeat offenders.

They are tactics the US government says are working - as recent figures have shown violent crime and murder falling.

But critics say that such policies have skewed the US system away from rehabilitation, storing up problems for the future.