mycatharsis.com

I found my long-since abandoned Google Reader account for my gmail account. It now includes a pretty cool feature to star certain articles and display them on your blog, as you can see in the “What I’m Reading” box on the right. I’ve tried a few RSS readers, but I just haven’t embraced them as much as I have other so-called Web 2.0 technologies, like Flickr, Wikipedia, Box.net and others. But Google does have a fairly nice reader, and it might be useful, especially as far as this blog is concerned. I might just start using an RSS aggregator, finally.

My first ’starred’ article on the Google Reader was this post on The Agitator, entitled American Gulag. Some of these numbers are nothing short of astounding. We’ve nearly doubled our inmate population in just 5 years! From 1.3 million in 2001 to 2.2 million today. The number of non-violent offenders incarcerated is more than the COMBINED populations of Wyoming and Alaska! I have asked myself in the past, how long before people sit up and take note? Will people eventually start pushing back against the recent trend for harsher and harsher penalties, including for all these non-violent offenses? For a couple reasons, I think it’s bound to happen sooner than later.

There’s a saying that a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested. Not sure I necessarily believe that, but I have to admit both Rush Limbaugh and Tom Delay have worked hard to prove my doubts about that statements veracity ill-founded. But I do believe that people will look at our justice system much more closely when it matters to them personally. It’s one thing when some ‘anonymous dirtball’ is arrested, but another thing entirely when that anonymous dirtball is your son or your sister, or yourself, etc. The more people that are incarcerated, the more people out there have a loved one who is incarcerated. The more people we incarcerate, the more closely our current system will be inspected. Or at least you would hope. At what point does this tip the scales? At what point do more people start demanding a common sense system of justice? It’s an interesting question, and will be interesting to see if the increasing experience even our law abiding citizens have with dealing with our justice system starts a renaissance of sorts and changes the way we look at our current policies of incarceration.

On a somewhat related tangent, have you seen the “click it or ticket” ads? Across the country, cops are cracking down, etc. Just how much money has the DOT spent on these ads? And how much money are police departments around the country raking in ticketing people for doing something that endangers no one but themselves? If those ads aren’t proof positive of our nanny state, I’d like to hear what is.