Controlling Crime - police, mafia, politicians, etc

One of the many problems:

If this report from Tehelka about the complicity of the police in the Nithari serial killings does not outrage you, check your pulse–you may be brain dead and therefore be qualified to be an Indian political leader.

A Possible solution:

The number of rebels on the Web site is still tiny compared to Palermo's businesses overall, but their movement has helped to chip away at the Mafia's psychological hold on Sicilians - long conditioned to believe that defiance would bring ruin or a death sentence. And any consistent crumbling of that culture of fear could ultimately lead to Cosa Nostra's undoing.

The businesses are openly defying the Mafia by signing on to a Web site called "Addiopizzo" (Goodbye Pizzo), which brings together businesses in the Sicilian capital that are resisting extortion.

1. Track down every police - maintain an online directory, editable/commentable (anonymous too).

2. Assign local representatives to tag/track every policeman in that area.

3. Make these locally electable positions. Not appointments. Self governance. Why have democracy at the top level, if our people don't know how it is going to work locally? Make school principals/teachers locally electable too. These guys pay lotsa money in bribes to get a job, they might as well spend it on getting elected.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

The United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.