Politicians have exploited the American fetish for control. We have a sad history of enslaving and attempting to control the behavior of our peers. The result has been a political hijack of the judicial system, leading to the USA becoming the world's most prolific jailer.
H. L. Mencken defined a Puritan as “one who has the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.”
Remnants of the Puritan theocracy and slavery continue to haunt the United States of America.
The pious Puritans in the northern colonies believed that the government should actively legislate morality and patrol the minds and actions of their peers. The Puritan theocracy is still alive in State and Federal legislatures as these increasingly powerful bodies of government continue to pile up regulations and laws controlling all conceivable conduct. Any behavior that might be offensive to a Puritan Sabbath school marm is eventually criminalized. My Pennsylvania Criminal Justice Handbook for 2009, which merely identifies and defines crimes and criminal procedure (i.e. no annotations or explanations), consumes 1718 pages, without the 490 page index. This flabby manual contains almost twice as many pages as the Holy Bible I received upon joining my church.
Legislatures have not only enacted a plethora of statutes criminalizing any behavior that a self-righteous Puritan deems unholy, they have usurped the Judiciary by enacting mandatory sentences for dozens and dozens of crimes, again so they can look good and righteous before the eyes of their constituents as being “tough on crime.” In Pennsylvania, the following conduct now triggers separately coded crimes: for “disrupting a meeting " (18 P.S. 5508), “unauthorized school bus entry” (18 P.S. 5517), “Furnishing Free Insurance” (18 P.S. 7310) and “Fortune Telling” (18 P.S. 7104) to name a few. Oh, and “Unlawful Sale of Term Papers” is a separately coded offense that can also result in a term of imprisonment (18 P.S. 7324).
On November 6, 2011 Nicholas J. Wooddell of Beaver County, Pennsylvania punched his grammy’s dog. Apparently, this was a crisis that could not be handled by the family internally, so Wooddell was charged with multiple criminal offenses and placed in jail until he could make bond. [“Police: Man Punched Dog”.Timesonline.com.local news Nov. 6, 2011; Pa docket no. MJ36304-CR-0000181-2011]. These days, no situation, no matter how trivial, can escape the intervention of government.
The United States of America was the last civilized nation on earth to abolish slavery. Thomas Jefferson, one of the most eloquent proponents of personal liberty in world history, was a slave-master himself.
In the South, slavery has persisted in a grotesque fashion by way of the great American prison system. No region of the world locks human beings behind bars at the breakneck rate of the southern USA, save perhaps Puritan Pennsylvania. Every state in the South incarcerates more than 450 people per 100,000 inhabitants. And these are just state incarceration rates, not federal or county or local! To put this number in perspective, the State of Alabama alone imprisons human beings at ten times the rate as the entire nation of Japan (648 vs. 62 per 100,000). Sadly, over 60% of those jailed in the yellowhammer state are American Negros.
The end result of this fetish for control and ultimate incarceration of those persons who do not act or speak or live as “we” desire is that the United States of America has morphed into a prison society. The USA is hands-down the world’s leading jailer. Although the USA has only 3% of the world’s population (much of it now anile and feeble) -- we have nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners -- and we are now paying the price for our fetish.
Yardbird USA is the best term I can think of to describe our shameful state.
