Interesting graphs and charts department

[tw]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Well, rising unemployment can lead to government stimulus packages,

When recessions occur, unemployment goes up. A government that continues spending normally also goes up on that chart. A reduced GDP and unchanged government spending appears on that chart as increased government spending.

The chart would have to be deceptive. On that chart, both unemployment and government spending must go up when GDP goes down. Those trends report nothing useful or informative.

[ZenGum]

That, sir, is a Good Point.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by classicman

Can't get the pics out, but a good look at a couple more.
I'm in this BIG EFFIN RED area with a few other dwellars.

27+ weeks 45.9% Gah!

Wall Street Journal

[classicman]

tx xob

[classicman]

###

[classicman]

What happened in 1980 - Privatization or what?

[Lamplighter]

Ronald Reagan

[classicman]

yeh, I got that much ... and?

[Pico and ME]

Is that when the war on drugs started?

[Lamplighter]

From Classic's graph link in Wikipedia...

Marijuana constitutes almost half of all drug arrests, and between 1990–2002, marijuana accounted for 82% of the increase in the number of drug arrests . In 2004, approximately 12.7% of state prisoners and 12.4% of Federal prisoners were serving time for a marijuana-related offense.[53]

The practice of imposing longer prison sentences on repeat offenders is common in many countries, but the Three strike laws in the U.S., which mandate 25 year imprisonment and were implemented in many states in the 1990s, is very extreme in comparison with most European countries. During the first 9 years after Nixon coined the expression War on Drugs, statistics show only a minor increase in the total number of imprisoned which implies that some factor other than the declaration of "war" is the primary contributor to the incarceration rate.

Reagan, as Governor of Calif pushed the de-institutionalization of patients with mental illness...
proposing instead they be treated in their local communities with the State providing funds.
The funding never happened.
Then, as President, this de-institutionalization program spread across the nation.

[classicman]

That seems to be a big part of it P&M...

Much of that surge is the result of public policy, such as the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing. Nearly 1 in 4 of the inmates in federal and state prisons are there because of drug-related offenses, most of them nonviolent.
Narcotic-related arrests

New drug policies have especially affected incarceration rates for women, which have increased at nearly double the rate for men since 1980. Nearly 1 in 3 women in prison today are serving sentences for drug-related crimes.

[classicman]

A major cause of such high numbers is the length of the prison sentences in the United States. One of the criticisms of the United States system is that it has much longer sentences than any other part of the world. The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years, compared to other developed countries around the world where a first time offense would warrant at most 6 months in jail.[16] Mandatory sentencing prohibits judges from using their discretion and forces them to place longer sentences on nonviolent offenses than they normally would do.

bold mine

[ZenGum]

Regarding the politicians who wrote those laws, were they being lobbied by the owners of private prisons, perhaps?


Minor point - the graph suggests the growth in prison population has slowed since 2000, but the last column is only from 2000 to 2006, but is still drawn as wide as the other ten-year columns. Probably growth has continued at the same rate.

[Lamplighter]

Prisons, Privatization, And Public Values *
Stephen McFarland
Chris McGowan 
Tom O'Toole
Presented to Prof. Mildred Warner 
Privatization and Devolution CRP 612 
December 2002

Introduction to Prison Privatization

The movement towards the privatization of corrections in the
United States is a result of the convergence of two factors:
the unprecedented growth of the US prison population since 1970
and the emergence out of the Reagan era of a political environment
favorable to free-market solutions.

Since the first private prison facility was opened in 1984, the industry has grown rapidly;
gross revenues exceeded $1 billion in 1997. This paper will examine the industry's growth
in the US in recent decades, and its current scope. The evidence for and against
claims that private prisons can realize gains in efficiency will be weighed,
and implications of privatization for other public values including safety, justice, and legitimacy will be examined.
<snip>

A note in passing: The GEO Corporation used to be named the "Wackenhut Corrections Corporation"
Sounds a bit like McCain's "Wack-A-Mole" theory of war.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

From Classic's graph link in Wikipedia...



Reagan, as Governor of Calif pushed the de-institutionalization of patients with mental illness...
proposing instead they be treated in their local communities with the State providing funds.
The funding never happened.
Then, as President, this de-institutionalization program spread across the nation.

Not to defend the resultant lack of care, but we cannot gloss over what those institutions were and occasionally still are. Abuse and neglect were rampant the system needed to be bulldozed not tweaked. Even today the institutionalized mentally ill suffer at the hands of insensitive, sometimes abusive, poorly trained staff. My SiL is trying to cleanup one such public facility in NYS. You would not believe how many workers are on administrative leave when they should have been fired and maybe prosecuted. Cuomo is rightfully pissed about it.

Oh and legalize it. You know, if Obama put a legalization plank down, I'd be back on board in a heartbeat. Hell I might even put a election sign by the road.