A couple of years ago, Conrad Black from Montreal was one of the biggest newspaper tycoons in the world. <\/p>\n
Black is now serving time in the U.S., convicted on charges that he diverted funds from his company into his own pocket. Prosecutors accused him of running a “corporate kleptocracy.”<\/p>\n
The interesting twist from a North Country point of view is that Black has been penning editorials, some of which observe the state of criminal justice in the U.S.<\/p>\n
His opinions are obviously to be viewed in context: he’s a convicted felon, serving 78 months in a federal prison.<\/p>\n
But it’s still a point of view worth thinking about occasionally, given that prisons are the mainstay of our region’s economy.<\/p>\n
His comments first appeared in Spear’s Wealth Management Survey magazine.<\/p>\n
The US is now a carceral state that imprisons eight to 12 times more people (2.5m) per capita than the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Japan.<\/p>\n
US justice has become a command economy based on the avarice of private prison companies, a gigantic prison service industry and politically influential correctional officers\u2019 unions that agitate for an unlimited increase in the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences.<\/p>\n
The entire \u201cwar on drugs\u201d, by contrast, is a classic illustration of supply-side economics: a trillion taxpayers\u2019 dollars squandered and 1m small fry imprisoned at a cost of $50 billion a year; as supply of and demand for illegal drugs have increased, prices have fallen and product quality has improved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What do you think? Is American justice unduly influenced by economics and politics? Comment below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A couple of years ago, Conrad Black from Montreal was one of the biggest newspaper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}