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You know, back in the old days.. maybe say a whopping twenty years ago, cops were actually trained and were able to apply techniques like swarming to take somebody down.

And before anybody goes there with "what if they've got a knife?".. then the .40 cal comes out

They do: prison industry.

The U.S. economy would collapse if all victimless activities (otherwise known as freedoms) were made legal.

http://www.prisonactivist.org/crisis/evans-goldber g.html

It is true. While this article is a couple of years old, the data remains mostly the same today. Blacks: 12% of the population, as high as 30% of the prison population. Whites: 75% of the population, about the same for the prison population. While it gets better for you the whiter you are, non-black/non-white prisoners aren't much better off than the blacks.

http://www.prisonactivist.org/pipermail/prisonact- list/2001-July/003968.html

If you are talking about the shuttle, then we are currently running at 14 deaths from about 100 shuttle launches (rounding for simplicity), or over 100,000 per million shuttle launches. The shuttles are running a bit behind.

If you are talking about satellites, then I don't know what the numbers are, but they blow up all the time. The fact that they achieve 30 deaths per million launches is because they are unmanned and usually launched over the sea, not because of any inherant safety record.

As of 1996, your categorization of the US's murder rate as "one of the lowest in the world" is misleading. Only 23 of 86 surveyed countries had higher rates.

http://www.haciendapub.com/stolinsky.html/

Despite pro-death marketing, studies pretty consistently show that capital punishment has no deterrent effect.

http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-07/capital-punishmen t.html/

In fact, murder rates tend to go up during periods in which death sentences are actually carried out.

http://www.prisonactivist.org/death-penalty/dpstud y.html/

A friend of mine is the webmaster of PhilaPhans.com, and was also affected by Allan Carlson's activities. He pointed me to this little note (scroll down to "Elysian Valley, Burbank"), where the guy's name pops up again:

Virginia de la Torre found a hate message in Aug. tucked inside a frozen chicken dinner. Robert Kennedy, a Long Beach lawyer representing the California Grocers Association says that since 1992, there have been more than 800 incidents of hate messages found inside products sold in stores in Ventura, Los Angeles and Orange counties. "You name the store, you name the product, and they've been hit," he said. "The slurs are against Jews and blacks and Hispanics. It's an ongoing problem." A Los Angeles Superior Court judge issued an injunction against Allan Eric Carlson of Glendale, prohibiting him from putting such pamphlets into packages in any of the 1,100 stores in the three-county area that are members of the grocers association. Carlson had been arrested and is on probation for two similar incidents; in one he vandalized notebooks and books with WAR [White Aryan Resistance] stickers and stamps; in a second, he assaulted a school custodian after being caught stuffing flyers into student lockers in Simi Valley.

So there you have it. Like McSpew said, he's a crank and a racist.

The US police has a sexual fixation on arresting people. I don't think there is any other country in the world where the police arrest as menay people as in the US for the most ridicoulus reasons. It's liek I sometimes are convinced that the get a bonus for arresting the most every week or so!

You have a very good point. Here in America ("The Land of the Free") we do have a higher percentage of the population incarcerated than in any other country in the world.

Don't take the freedoms in your country for granted. We did here in the US, and look what happened to us!

..seems a bit steep for a company that uses prison labor to shrink wrap the boxes. I can't imagine more than a few dimes for pressing a CD. Maybe those fancy holograms are responsible..

The War on Drugs has been responsible for massive amounts of federal asset seizures. I can't remember if it was Bush or Reagan, but one of 'em enacted a law that gave the federal law enforcement agencies the abillity to seize your goods if they even SUSPECTED you were involved in some form of drug trade or possession, and they don't have to disclose the "evidence" that led them to believe you were guilty. This resulted in a lot of innocent people taking it in the bung.

I see a parallel here in recent events. The government has just come up with another way to criminalize otherwise innocent people. We already have a greater percent of the population incarcerated than any nation (but, hey, it's good for the economy!).

The scariest thing, to me, is that if the government spent as much time and money trying to educate us about drugs, rather then spend it on propaganda, we might not have so many lives destroyed. Similarly, if we spent as much time and money on finding a peaceful solution to the terrorist problem, instead of bombing the hell out of people and whittling away at US Citizens' civil liberties, maybe we could get somewhere.

Meanwhile, I'm a bit scared that my political beliefs will get me thrown in a jail. Please, you may not agree that we shouldn't be bombing Afghanastan, and you may not agree with my politics, but every single American is in danger of losing our freedoms. And that's what we are supposed to be fighting for in the first place, isn't it?

Speak out!

This would be great for prisons that want to help, or allow, their "clientelle" to get on the net. Maybe a neat spinoff of the Prisoner's Literature Project could be the Prisoner's Internet Access Project.