Exonerated Prisoners

Here is an important story from PBS' Religion & Ethics Weekly about innocent victims of the judicial system. Transcript and video here:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1048/cover.html

In addition to what you'll hear in the story, here are some other important insights:

(1) Because "getting tough on crime" gets votes, politicians in the US have over-criminalized behavior, especially for people who had no criminal intent. And because of mandatory sentencing laws, the lack of criminal intent isn't allowed as a factor in sentencing. This is well documented in the book Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything by Gene Healy.

(2) The U.S.(population 300 million) has more people in prison than any other country in the world, including China (pop. 1.3 Billion) and Russia. So, do we really believe that there are more real criminals in the US than a country with 4x the population? Here are the top 20:

1	United States of America	2,193,798
2	China	1,548,498
3	Russian Federation	885,666
4	Brazil	401,236
5	India	332,112
6	Mexico	213,926
7	Thailand	161,844
8	South Africa	161,674
9	Ukraine	160,046
10	Iran	150,321
11	Indonesia	116,688
12	Poland	90,714
13	Philippines	89,639
14	Pakistan	89,370
15	Vietnam	88,414
16	Rwanda	c.82,000
17	United Kingdom: England & Wales	80,803
18	Japan	79,052
19	Bangladesh	79,000
20	Germany	76,629

(source: World Prison Brief of the International Centre for Prison Studies)