It took me THREE hours to drive home tonight, thanks to the snow and the traffic mayhem that ensued. Fortunately Carl was way ahead of me and so Noah was eating and apparently watching Bob the Builder while I was trying my best not to get road rage. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I had had any sustenance in the car with me, even if I had filled my water bottle, but I didn’t realize my commute was going to be Down the Rabbit Hole. And I didn’t dare stop at a strip mall lest I miss bedtime.
However, Americans take note: I heard the latest research puts 1 in 100 Americans in jail. That is, you have the highest rate of incarceration basically, ever, far ahead of all the other countries, including China, both in absolute and per capita terms. This sort of fascinates me in a horrible half-gleeful way, tempered by the awareness that my sister is probably moving from MI to TX really soon and that, you know, I am myself American and pretty much all my bio-family is apparently more in danger of being jailed than many, many other things.
I’d like to talk to you about how electing judges and what do you call crown attorneys? Prosecutors? OH District Attorneys might lead to this in part because “I put eleventy billion bad people in jail!” sounds better than “I took my time to determine the truth and also be merciful” on TV. Or how possibly your weird-ass drug laws are contributing. Or how really it seems to be a way to put black and Hispanic people away. And also, why do people who haven’t paid traffic tickets seem to end up in jail for a long time?
But instead I just condense these issues I really know very little about into one small plea: maybe you should reconsider “the land of the free” in your national anthem. I’ll make you a deal. Since Canada is increasingly a nation of immigrants, we’ll take out “our home and native land.”
Yes, I had too much time to think in the car.
