zlacker

>>gruseo+(OP)
There's one single paragraph in this entire article that addresses the root of the problem:

> In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100. Since then, the voters, alarmed at a surge in violent crime, have demanded fiercer sentences. Politicians have obliged. New laws have removed from judges much of their discretion to set a sentence that takes full account of the circumstances of the offence. Since no politician wants to be tarred as soft on crime, such laws, mandating minimum sentences, are seldom softened. On the contrary, they tend to get harder.

On top of that, you also have an entrenched set of special interests who benefit from the status quo (police unions, prison guard unions, private prisons, etc.), so the pressure on politicians is from two sides.

So how do you "solve" a problem that special interests, along with a sizable majority of the voting population, have no interest whatsoever in solving?

Without a massive culture shift, you don't.

>>jsdalt+85
Before throwing our hands up in despair we should consider that some simple reforms of the prosecution system in the U.S. would make a huge difference. There are a lot of shakedowns going on in the U.S. system (it's hard to call it a justice system at this point). But a wide-ranging list of abuses of power feature prosecutors actively participating. Prosecutors in the U.S. have a lot of incentives for corruption and very few safeguards.

The problem is in the U.S. a lot of objectively unethical activities and policies are not considered unethical. A lot of horrendous official behavior passes by without people call it what it is: Corruption.

Of course it's not just prosecutors, it's amazing sometimes to see judges, lawyers, and many other public officials participating in cases in which they clearly have stake in the outcome without people calling it out with the C-word. My conjecture is just that reforming the prosecutorial system would have a big effect on the quality of the overall system and may not be as hard as some other approaches.

Regardless I've been in despair about this for a long time myself, but more recently I've started coming to believe that shifting the ethical goal posts in this country just by using a small list of very simple and objective guidelines and focusing on key centers of corruption.

Ethics are not universal, or at least are not proven to be universal. They are a social construction. It's clear, as others have said, that it's society that needs to change. How about starting by more of us being jerks in the level and ferocity with which we decry unethical behavior large and small and place our highest priority for social and political activism within the U.S. (and many other places) on that.