Oh, what did you think I was talking about, brown people? Ha, fuck you, no. I’m actually talking about the news that 1 in every 100 adult Americans is in prison. No, no shit, for real. Fully one percent of the population of this country is in fucking jail. Oh, and let’s not talk about if you are brown. One in every 26 Latino men is in jail, and one in EVERY FIFTEEN African-American men in this country in is in jail (sorry, RedManLaw, no stats for Native Americans but I’m sure it sucks for them, too). White girls like me have it slightly better, with only one in every 355 of us in jail, but, sorry, DickCheneysBlackSister, you’re a little too above-average- one in every 100 African-American women is incarcerated these days. Oh, and you know I got some thoughts about that shit, and not just because it’s after 2 am and I’ve been drinking.

Paul Cassel, a former federal judge and a current LAW PROFESSOR, says that us liberal bleeding-heart types are overlooking the benefit of INCARCERATING ONE PERCENT OF THE POPULATION OF OUR MOTHERFUCKING COUNTRY. Which is, naturally, that us good white folks get robbed less. Well, I mean, he didn’t say “us” or “white folks” but let’s all agree that we know what he meant, right? Because we do.

Also, by the way, we imprison more people than the motherfucking People’s Republic of motherfucking China. Oh, and it costs us an estimated $49 billion dollars each and ever year just on state prisons (i.e., let’s not count federal penitentiaries or local jails).

Okay, so, time for my drunken rant here. We have put literally one percent of the population of this country in jail for violating the norms of civilized society. But it’s 1 percent of our population! Are you shitting me? Like, who here has not technically committed a jail-able offense? Like, say, “buzzed” drove, or smoked pot, or sped more than 15 mph above the speed limit or whatever? Isn’t it just obvious that ALL prosecution is selective prosecution? How does this help our country, or FSM forbid, its citizens? How many people need to be put in the clink before we maybe ask ourselves if our supposed “norms” aren’t really normal?

I’ll tell a little anecdote here. When I was in college, I took a class on Law and Sociology (I majored in the latter), and probably got off on this kind of rant one night and my mom (a Dem) thought I was just off on some stereotypical college-kid-doesn’t-understand-the-real-world rant and dismissed it. Then, she took a job at the Department of Corrections as a computer programmer and started visiting state prisons so she could help the guards better by understanding what it is that they do. It took 3 visits, and she apologized to me for thinking I was some freaky libtard. Visiting the functional equivalent of a supermax prison, it was the first time in her like that my mom was the minority. It was also the first time in, like, 25 years that she’d been hooted or hollered at. And the reality of the situation, given where she grew up and where we lived, that not one of the motherfucking crazy white trash people we knew had his Doppelgänger in supermax… well, my mom started thinking that maybe all those student loans weren’t such a waste after all.

Anyway, drunken rant aside, this is some fucked up shit, for real. And the Ohio/Texas primaries (both practicing death penalty states, btw) are way more important than any of this shit because these are, like, totally bad people, right? I mean, at least they were after we incarcerated them with really bad people and took away any possibility of having a real job ever again.

U.S. Imprisons One in 100 Adults, Report Finds [NY Times]