Biography

The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That's not just many more than in other developed countries but seven to ten 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. Even developing countries that are well known for their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. The U.S.'s prison population has quadrupled since 1980. So something has happened in in the past thirty years to push millions of people into prison. That something, of course, is the war on drugs.

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. If Pat Robertson can admit he was wrong, surely it is not too much to ask the same of America's political leaders.

In the days of the Arab Spring, we were all intoxicated by the sight of millions gathered in public squares to protest dictatorial governments. We hoped this would culminate in liberal democracy in the Arab world. Two years later, it's clear the prospects in the region are mixed. It turns out the key is not people power but paper power. The focus should be less on elections and more on constitutions.

Those urging the U.S. to intervene in Syria are certain of one thing: if we had intervened sooner, things would have been better in that war-torn country. Had the Obama Administration gotten involved earlier, there would be less instability and fewer killings. We would not be seeing, in John McCain's words,' atrocities that are on a scale that we have not seen in a long, long time'. In fact, we have seen atrocities much worse than those in Syria very recently - in Iraq under U.S. occupation, only a few years ago. The U.S. was about as actively engaged in Iraq as is possible, and yet more terrible things happened there than in Syria. All the features of the Syrian civil war that are supposedly the result of U.S. non-intervention also appeared in Iraq despite America's massive intervention there.