The Real Police State (4/4)

August 11, 2010

America locks up more than twice the people that China does, and it isn’t cheap to keep someone in a US prison.  The cost is as high as $50,000 a year x 2.4 million.  You do the math.

This American mess has come about over the last 40 years because of an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives.

Common sense says to execute the most dangerous criminals. 

If the US eliminated the 200,000 over 50 serving life sentences, that would reduce the Federal deficit by as much as 10 billion annually or 100 billion in a decade. In fact, the US should execute everyone who is serving a life sentence without a chance for parole.

I find it interesting that America wages wars in countries like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan where millions have been killed and sometimes women and children die as collateral damage but balks at executing dangerous criminals in the US who are locked up for life without a chance for parole.

The solution could be to send these criminals to China and let the Chinese do the job for America.

See An Update about China’s Criminal Justice System or return to The Real Police State – Part 3

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

Sign up for an RSS Feed for iLook China

Leave a Comment » | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, crime, cultural differences | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Real Police State (2/4)

August 10, 2010

No one knows for sure how many criminals are executed in China.  Amnesty International says the numbers are in the thousands.

I find it interesting that no one in the West has studied China to see if there is a link between the way China treats convicted criminals and a culture that has survived for several thousand years. I’m sure there are Americans who might not want to know the results.

The United States may not execute as many as China does, but the US locks up more people than any country—more than twice that of China, a country with almost five times the population.

In fact, The Economist published an interesting piece about America called Rough Justice.

The Economist says, “Conservatives and liberals will always feud about the right level of punishment.…  As a result, American prisons are now packed not only with thugs and rapists but also with petty thieves, minor drug dealers and criminals, who, though scary when they were young and strong, are now too grey and arthritic to pose a threat. Some 200,000 inmates are over 50—roughly as many as there were prisoners of all ages in 1970.”

See Officer in Action or return to The Real Police State – Part 1

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

Sign up for an RSS Feed for iLook China

Leave a Comment » | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, cultural differences | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Real Police State (1/4)

August 9, 2010

China is a culture that has never gone easy on convicted criminals. When I was researching 19th Century China for Robert Hart’s Concubine Saga, there was an incident in Canton that Hart wrote about where the Chinese Imperial government had fifty Chinese randomly selected from a street near a gate where rebels had broken into the city. 

Those fifty were beheaded without a trial to show others what would happen if a similar incident took place. The heads were put in cages where the people could see them as a reminder.

More than a century later, the BBC and Wondering China reported that China’s highest law-making body would debate a draft amendment to criminal law soon to reduce the number of crimes that carry the death penalty.

A brief history of China’s legal system shows that when Mao died, there was no legal system in place at the time. In the 1980s, during the infancy of China’s legal system, the lower courts could apply the death penalty, but the numbers executed caused Westerners to protest the inhumanity of such acts.

As a result, in 2007, the law changed and death sentences had to be reviewed by a higher court before gaining approval.  Without giving the exact numbers, the Chinese report that the number of executions is down.

See China Law and Justice System

_______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

Sign up for an RSS Feed for iLook China

Leave a Comment » | America, American culture, China, Chinese Culture, cultural differences | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse