FREE PLAXICO (AND AROUND 2 MILLION OTHERS)

Former New York Football Giants' wide receiver Plaxico Burress did a very stupid thing last November. He was out on the town with friends and a teammate having a good time just like a lot of young rich athletes in the big city. Only thing different is that Plaxico had a gun in his pocket, who knows why. The gun went off, shooting him in the leg. Pretty dumb thing thing to do on top of the dumb thing of carrying a pistol around in the first place. To add insult to stupidity and a gunshot wound, he was arrested on a gun charge and reckless endangerment, even though no one else was hurt. Needless to say his season was over and the following April he lost his job when the Giants cut him, voiding a 5 year contract he had signed before the season worth $35 million.

So the guy was in a world of trouble and the mayor of New York was calling for him to go jail, the knee-jerk reaction of almost everyone in America these days for just about any crime or misdemeanor. It's not just easy targets like wealthy young arrogant dopes like Plaxico Burress. Well, arrogance and stupidity may be annoying, but no cause to send somebody to prison. The guy got shot, lost his job and was out 35 million bucks. That's not punishment enough? There was no attack on anybody, no one else sustained any injuries, no malice at all was either displayed or intended. A young man made a stupid mistake and paid a stiff price for it, period, amen. Who the hell are we to want to lock him away in a prison, the place where we send criminals?

And that's exactly what happened to him yesterday, he was sentenced to 2 years in prison, joining a not-so-exclusive American community of 2.2 million souls. There is a sick mentality in this country when we lock up more people in prisons than any other nation on earth. Not only more per on capita, one of every 137 Americans, an unconscionable statistic, but more overall than any other nation. Are Americans that much of a criminal society? The country that has the second largest prison population is China with 1.5 million prison inmates out of a population of 1.3 billion, or one out of every 867 Chinese. We have 700,000 more prisoners than a nation with more than 4 times our population! At the rate we lock people up, if we had China's population, we would have around 9 and a half million inmates. With less than one-twentieth of the world's people, we have one-quarter of the world's prisoners.

Prisons are for criminals and there are many people who belong behind bars, that's indisputable. Just not all that many. This cavalier attitude towards other people's freedom is insane. There are too many arrests, too many charges and too many people locked away for years at a time in the cruel and bitter institutions that are prisons. Prisons should be reserved for hardened criminals who have seriously harmed society and are a continuing danger to society, not as a dumping ground for every individual who has run afoul of the law. Are there no other solutions? How many of our young people have we corrupted forever by not seeking an alternative punishment, not giving them another chance and frankly not giving a rat's ass about them one way or another? Are we that callous a nation?

If we were as humane as the Chinese our prison population would be about 362,000. And China is a totalitarian government while we bill ourselves as the Land of The Free. Why can't we behave as well towards our own citizens as the Red Chinese government? What kind of cruel puritanical barbarians have we become? Sending someone to prison is a very severe and radical radical step not to be taken lightly. There are fewer things as cruel as being sent to prison and we as a society need to make sure that only those criminals who give us no choice in the matter are put away.There are individuals who by their outrageously unacceptable acts or continuous pattern of sociopathic behavior must be locked away from society, some of them forever. Just not one in every 137 people.

One in every 137 people in prison makes America either the most criminally prone society on earth, the cruelest society on earth or a nation that has lost control of its judicial and criminal justice system and has outlawed far too many things. The latter is the sad reality and the horror is that it is accepted by so many people. It is deeply ingrained in our society that people should to be sent to jail, even a young man like Plaxico Burress who went from being a Super Bowl hero one year to an unemployed athlete with a bullet hole in his leg the next. And now to satisfy this society's unbalanced need to exact cruel retribution even for victimless crimes, Plaxico Burress becomes a prison inmate among thieves, rapists and murderers. Is society safe now? Not from ourselves we're not.

If a foolish young man can be locked away in prison for hurting no one but himself, what's to say that any of us won't be next? Instead of prison being a rare and grave punishment befitting very serious crime, prison sentences are being handed out to pot smokers, prostitutes and first time small offenders like it was no big deal. No big deal to those of us not in prison, perhaps, but a huge deal and an incredibly traumatic experience for every prison inmate. Just because the rest of us may trivialize it does not make it trivial.

In this way we trivialize serious crime and exaggerate lesser offenses by sending lesser offenders to the same prisons as serous offenders. It's equating killing three people in a drive-by shooting with buying a recreational drug, or making a prostitute the equal of a rapist. Those things are not the same and the same punishment does not fit all crimes. It is an immature nation that insists upon demonizing the vices of others, never mind criminalizing them with stiff prison sentences. Well over a quarter of our 2.2 million inmates are in jail for strictly drug charges, and more than half are drug addicts forced to steal to support habits that are outrageously expensive simply because they are illegal. There are millions of people not in prison because the price of a whiskey habit is within reason.

Why one and not the other? Alcohol kills more people than all the illegal drugs combined and that's just fine with society. Why is a hopeless drunk any different than a hopeless heroin addict? Other than the $200 a day difference in the price of their addictions, that is. Is one morally superior because he pickles his brain with a legal intoxicant? The truth is there is no difference and 10% of the population are addicts who consume 90% of every variety of intoxicant, legal and otherwise. Legalizing them all would not create a single extra addict, any more than the repeal of Prohibition did in 1933. Legalization would bring the price of hard drugs down to a whiskey habit level, the government would collect billions in taxes and put the violent drug cartels out of business overnight and save the uncounted billions of untaxed dollars leaving the country, to say nothing of an immediate drop in crime.

Then perhaps those with the disease of addiction could be treated like patients instead of demons in human form worthy only of becoming prisoners. And perhaps we could try to better China's record of human rights by locking up only one person in a thousand. We can start by Freeing Paxico Burress, a foolish young man who has already paid the price for his crime in physical injury, a fortune, loss of livelihood and public humiliation. In this nation of immigrants seeking fresh starts and second chances, can we not show the same compassion to one another that Lady Liberty showed to our ancestors when they sailed into New York Harbor? Free Plaxico Burress, and around 2 million other prisoners. We are America, the Land of The Free. Let's make that more than a slogan, shall we?