...AND THROW AWAY THE KEY

The US has 5% of the earth's population.

The US has 70& of the earth's lawyers (most of them waiting in line to get into the REGJB).

And the US has 25% of the earth's prisoners.

Those are the statistics in this startling article in the NY Times:
PRISONERS

Here are some other highlights:
China- that bastion of godless communism with no respect for individual rights, has four times the population of the US, and one million less prisoners (2.6 million versus 1.6 million).

1 in 100 American adults are locked away in prison.

From the Times article:
It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.
“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”
No more.
“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”
...
The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

Rumpole says: For shame. And lets make sure we keep spending money making sure everyone who wants a gun gets one.

Here at home the State Attorneys Office is doing its part by seeking more jail sentences in county court and imposing the "trial tax" for those imprudent enough to actually take depositions, file motions, go to trial, and do all the other reprehensible things that the constitution (but NOT Kathy Rundle) gives them the right to do.

See You In Court, doing our small part to keep those numbers low.

PS. County Court lawyers- I have received your emails by the dozens today and I am acting on them in an appropriate manner. Please give me a day or two to sort this out.