suddenly recalling the deep impression mondrian first made on me.
webern too.
. . . .when aesthetics really was everything.
Wednesday 26 February 2014
mondrian
suddenly recalling the deep impression mondrian first made on me.
webern too.
. . . .when aesthetics really was everything.
Sunday 23 February 2014
dr allen ault
Dr Ault, despite being a psychologist, somehow ended up overseeing executions in Georgia until he finally walked away in 1995. He gives a very moving account of his first experience of the electric chair in this hardtalk interview for the BBC. He has since become a campaigner against the death penalty in the US. According to the article, he seems to be having some success. From this clip of interview it´s not so hard to see why.
Sunday 2 February 2014
US justice
I came across an interview with Conrad Black speaking to Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman in which he insists that he was innocent of the fraud charges for which he was convicted and served time in an American prison. After ranting about the inadequacies of the American judicial system he made the claim that the conviction rate in the US was 90% which seemed to me incredibly high. I did a little googling and found information on this hard to find and mostly contradictory.
However, various reports that I read led me to a website calling itself an "international centre for Prison studies" based at the University of Essex. Listed here are annually compiled comparative figures of numbers of prisoners per 100,000 general population in most countries of the world.
In USA in 2012 the website states that there were 2,228,424 people incarcerated which is a total of 707 out of every 100,000 inhabitants. This figure is down from 2,307,504 in 2008.
In UK at the same time the prison population stood at 84,392 which is a total of 148 per 100,000 inhabitants. In the Netherlands the total is 82 per 100,000 and in Iceland 47 per 100,000. France stands at 100, Denmark at 73 and India at an astonishingly low 30.
In the Eastern European countries the figures begin to rise again - Belarus has 335 out of every 100,000 in prison; Russia 474 - but still nowhere near the American figures. The Chinese figures were considered unreliable because they did not include the "detention centres" which were estimated in 2009 to be holding approximately 650,000. With these included the prison population would stand at about 2,300,000. Because of China's massive population, this still only makes 170 per 100,000.
I think it's possible to draw one main conclusion. The US imprisons too many of its inhabitants for too long.
According to another online report published in 2003 by an American - Marc Mauer - 13% of the African American male population are unable to vote because of the rule that imprisonment renders you ineligible for the rest of your life and 1,500,000 African American children have a father in prison.If you are an African American living in Washington DC there is a gobsmacking 75% likelihood that you will spend at least some time in a state prison.
The land of the free?
However, various reports that I read led me to a website calling itself an "international centre for Prison studies" based at the University of Essex. Listed here are annually compiled comparative figures of numbers of prisoners per 100,000 general population in most countries of the world.
In USA in 2012 the website states that there were 2,228,424 people incarcerated which is a total of 707 out of every 100,000 inhabitants. This figure is down from 2,307,504 in 2008.
In UK at the same time the prison population stood at 84,392 which is a total of 148 per 100,000 inhabitants. In the Netherlands the total is 82 per 100,000 and in Iceland 47 per 100,000. France stands at 100, Denmark at 73 and India at an astonishingly low 30.
In the Eastern European countries the figures begin to rise again - Belarus has 335 out of every 100,000 in prison; Russia 474 - but still nowhere near the American figures. The Chinese figures were considered unreliable because they did not include the "detention centres" which were estimated in 2009 to be holding approximately 650,000. With these included the prison population would stand at about 2,300,000. Because of China's massive population, this still only makes 170 per 100,000.
I think it's possible to draw one main conclusion. The US imprisons too many of its inhabitants for too long.
According to another online report published in 2003 by an American - Marc Mauer - 13% of the African American male population are unable to vote because of the rule that imprisonment renders you ineligible for the rest of your life and 1,500,000 African American children have a father in prison.If you are an African American living in Washington DC there is a gobsmacking 75% likelihood that you will spend at least some time in a state prison.
The land of the free?
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