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Originally posted by CATPIRATE:
The Poe Bleck Child is a grown man convicted of armed robbery. Stop making it some redneck justice on blacks.

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Originally posted by NewOldBrownCoat:
Hey, it's Florida, the state of Trayvon Martin; the state where a black woman got 20 years for firing a warning shot at her black husband, in her own house, where she had an injunction against him for spousal abuse, and which hit no one, but might have endangered her children, who were in another room, if the bullet had gone thru the walls the right way; and he's *B*L*A*C*K* ; fer crissake; which is *N*O*T* why they sentenced him that way; of course it's not, they aren't racist down there, they keep tellin' us that. They DO keep tellin' us that, because they have to, because we keep noticing that they seem to be.

You do notice that I'm not arguing that he's not guilty of the charge he was convicted on, or that he's not guilty of the whole string of other related robberies, or that he didn't shoot at the dog he didn't hit.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:

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Originally posted by CATPIRATE:
The Poe Bleck Child is a grown man convicted of armed robbery. Stop making it some redneck justice on blacks.

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How many white Wall Street bankers have been charged in the 2008 financial collapse? They made more than 12 trillion dollars just disappear, and yet none of them are in jail.

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Zakaria: Incarceration nation

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt of Fareed Zakaria's column in this week's TIME Magazine, which you can read in full here, behind a paywall.

By Fareed Zakaria

“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America - more than 6 million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and ­Britain - with a rate among the ­highest - has 153....

This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.

That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America’s federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession....

Bipartisan forces have created the trend that we see. Conservatives and liberals love to sound tough on crime, and both sides agreed in the 1990s to a wide range of new federal infractions, many of them carrying mandatory sentences for time in state or federal prison. And as always in American politics, there is the money trail. Many state prisons are now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals. These firms can create jobs in places where steady work is rare; in many states, they have also helped create a conveyor belt of cash for prisons from treasuries to outlying counties.

Partly as a result, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20 years. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons vs. $5.7 billion on the UC system and state colleges. Since 1980, California has built one college campus and 21 prisons. A college student costs the state $8,667 per year; a prisoner costs it $45,006 a year.

The results are gruesome at every ­level. We are creating a vast prisoner under­class in this country at huge expense, increasingly unable to function in normal society, all in the name of a war we have already lost....

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
How many white Wall Street bankers have been charged in the 2008 financial collapse? They made more than 12 trillion dollars just disappear, and yet none of them are in jail.

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
You might ask where someone would receive such a sentence for burglary, to be sent to jail without ever having the possibility of getting out EVER!! What sort of backward justice system would ever allow such a thing? Uganda? Sudan? Iran? Nope, Florida.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/cruel-punishment-for-first-offence-quar
tavious-20-jailed-for-162-years-with-no-parole-20120704-21gc2.html]


Otherwise, this is total BS and hopefully will be thrown out during the appeal process. I work with guys who used to deal hard core drugs who are younger than me and turning things around for themselves. They did a LOT more damage to people than this guy did. Before my mom married my step-dad, the step-sister I'll never meet was strangled to death by her boyfriend in her car by her boyfriend the night she was breaking up with him because she was going away to college. He's been a free man now for over 1/3 of my life after that.

Make sure Frem reads this.....

While most of us in here just talk about things, he actually does something about it. Don't know how full his plate is with his other projects and his own personal well being, but he may be able to rattle a few cages.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
At this rate the entire country from the middle class down is going to end up inmates working for the private prison system.

Can't tell me those little cubicles in offices and those desks in school aren't preparing people for that inevitability.

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