To add to that insanity, I checked, and it costs about $47,000/year to house an inmate in Caleefornya (Arnold speak). So 8 years times that works out to $376,000 total cost to imprison this person for stealing less than $4 worth of cheese. If that does not scream that we live in a sick, completely out of touch country, I don't know what does.

Indeed Obama's utter lack of action in prosecuting the Bush war criminals is very annoying. Of course it's hard t prosecute people for what they themselves are doing idn't it? Rinse and repeat for the big bankster thieves who far from spending time behind bars for crashing the economy instead are getting 20 million dollar bonuses from the tax payers pocketbook.

America is a a joke in poor taste. :(

Just as US wars create more enemies to justify the existence of its Military Industrial Complex, its brutal and stupid crime policies guarantee a steady flood of prisoners for its Prison Industrial Complex.

Look like? If California has a budgetary problem their citizens need to look at their popular referendums where the stupidity of the majority can pass laws overruling common sense. They might also want to look at why they have a governor whose only qualification for office was steroid-induced musculature and a cartoon-character acting career.

I really enjoyed your "the Uni-Cheeser? "Osama-Bin-Gouda"?
In the midst of all this insanity a moment of laughter reminds us that we are humans.

Indeed these are shocking figures. What did Tolstoy (or was it Dostoyevsky) say? That a society can be evaluated by looking at it's prisons, or something like that?

The person in question was no O.J. Simpson. He was not white, or wealthy, or connected. He is just another man who has a history of mental illness who has been mistreated and abused by the 'justice' system, making him the recidivist criminal he now is.

The vast majority of the US prison population is composed of the poor and minorities, many of whom have multiple convictions, in no small part due to the hostility former convicts face when they are eventually released. Confronted with limited and demeaning employment prospects, many have little choice but to return to a life of crime to simply support themselves. Many others have been utterly abandoned by the wider society, their whole existence seen as criminal from birth, so it is no wonder they turn to crime as a way of lashing out and rebelling against the majority (mostly white and wealthy).

And many of those who are now incarcerated in the US for-profit prison system have become little more than literal slave labour, making profits for dozens of companies that 'buy' their 'services' from the Corporation that runs the prisons they have been sentenced to.

In all likelihood, very soon this man will be joined by approximately 13 *MILLION* fellow food thieves who are doing nothing more than trying to feed themselves and and their families after their Federal unemployment payments are cut off later this year.

Should make for an interesting summer...

Too many states have '3 strike laws'. We have too many Joe Arpaios, too many prosecutors building their political careers with our tax dollars (Paul Morrison, disgraced Attorney General in Kansas - a vile human), the list goes on. But you know what,, it is our fault. We allowed the law & order crowd to be elected.

I resigned as a court psychologist consultant because of the abuses by prosecutors, judges, and police in our court houses. We are all in peril.

Why is your daughter reading Les Miserables? Is it on the standardized test?

Seriously, congratulations that your child is reading a book like Les Mis and experiencing it empathically. I am happy she will be around in my children's world.

Joe

We haven't made much progress in how we treat the poor and hungry have we? I don't believe that other Western nations have criminalized nearly everything as we have here in the US.

-"I expected at least a few comments harshly condemning poor Ferguson ..."

arghhhhhh!! Once a cheese stealer, always a cheese stealer!!!! Lock him up and throw away the cheese platter!!

Ooooh, Can I try to play the role of a jackass troll?

Don't do the Crime if you can't do the time! Should have just been shot by the cops, not just arrested by them and wasting money on a needless trial!

ummm, can't think of anymore of their talking points. I'll just nip off to Freeperville and see what I can find... Hang on a while, it might take me a year or two...

Well, you don't have show trials in the states do you? Right? Oh, guano...

I mean if you go to trial there is a good chance that the innocent won't be convicted or get charged with breaking every law in the book. Oh, really...

So, not much difference then...

It is different in that we pay for it

They really aren't much different. The NKVD was a commission of three people used instead of a court to punish anit-soviets. In other words many of the prisoners were there for political reasons. In the US the prosecutors are given a lot of resources, yet the public defenders are given very small budgets and often employ the worst attorneys in the country. They essentially threaten 95% of all defendants into taking a plea, even the innocent, using various techniques. This essentially makes them a branch of the prosecutor's office. Our legislators have been lobbied by the prison-industrial complex into passing harsh laws for longer sentences and to incarcerate those who would have been on probation or picking up garbage along highways.

Stalin was purging the communist party officials and non-commmunist party members, and used this system to repress peasants. There have been many instances in the US where groups of blacks who are usually democrats have been wrongfully arrested and forced to take a plea for a felony charge, then they can't vote, thereby decreasing the numbers of democrats in the voting pool. Some of the prisoners are political prisoners. I know this to be true because I was wrongfully imprisoned because of politics. This also keeps them from getting social services and jobs, insuring they will end up in and out of prison.

Considering the other things going on in this country, really the only difference is there is heat in most of our prisons.

What's that old saying about the laws being equal in that they prevent both the rich and the poor from sleeping under a bridge???

And...Are considered "very savy business men" by the President.

The notion of being "unable to control his impulse to steal" seems a more appropriate appellation to the Wall Street banksters and their minions in the White House and Congress.

Of course, unlike the poor wretch who will spend years behind bars, the psycopaths who control the monetary system will relax comfortably on their yachts or in their mansions in Southern France.

All this crap started when Nixon's War on Drugs kicked off in the late 60's and the Fed provided massive amounts of cash to toss Nixon's hippy tormentors in jails.

Reagan renewed the War on Drugs, as did the Bush Cartel. A huge waste.

The Judges in Ventura, Ca stood up to Gov. Pete Wilson in the 90's when they refused Wilson's order to sentence a cologne thief to prison for life. Wilson threatened, Reagan bully-style, to fire the judges.

Their reply to the repub Gov was, fire us... with the way this law is written you don't need us, anyway.

Wilson backed down.

It's been revised.

Good point, and lucky for him it was only cheese. The concomitant theft of crackers might constitute an "aggravating circumstance" under California law. I presume that in this case, cracker-crumb residue tests were inconclusive.

With an aggressive prosecutor and an old-school Simi-Valley-style "law and order" jury, that would've been enough to put him away permanently.

· Yr Obd't Servant