How they see us - from the Conservative, Law and Order Daily Telegraph of London

We are getting quite a reputation for legal thuggishness, even amongst our friends.  I think the key explanation is liberal fascism.  Once the state defines itself as the agent for social change, then it follows that the recalcitrant must be punished.  I don't know this for sure but I would bet good money that the majority of imprisoned and the great majority of convicted felons in America have been convicted of crimes that didn't even exist 100 years ago.  Land of the 'free' is ringing less and less true.  And other people are beginning to notice.  Oh, and the qualifier below:  "most punitive developed nation in the world"?  pace the Economist the US criminal justice is the most punitive in the world.  Period.  Full stop.

And where's BHO?  Supposedly he's an 'African American', not just a half white, half Kenyan carpetbagger from Honolulu.  Yet half of all black men are convicts and one in ten imprisoned. And he, of course, isn't going to do a damn thing about it.  Too busy preserving union jobs.  Particularly those at prisons.

Mr Obama’s discussions with David Cameron will centre on how that prospectus can prevail across the planet. Back in the US, however, the president’s claims to be the guardian of universal liberty strike a hollow note. As the 2.4 million citizens serving time could testify, the land of the free is the most punitive developed nation on Earth.

One American adult in 100 is behind bars, rising to one in nine among young black men. The quadrupling of incarceration since 1970 cannot be explained by the brutishness of Americans, who are marginally less criminally inclined, though slightly more homicidal, than the English, or by the success of harsh sentencing: violent offences have risen for four decades.

Behind the razzmatazz of a state visit, Britain is also embroiled in a crime crisis. Mr Cameron, along with Nick Clegg and Theresa May, is working on salvaging Ken Clarke’s White Paper on sentencing, due out today but postponed after the row about rape tariffs.

Yesterday, Harriet Harman lambasted the Justice Secretary, as Labour and rebel Tories again attacked proposals to increase the reduction in sentences for an early guilty plea from 33 to 50 per cent. Mr Clarke’s sin, in the eyes of some critics, was not his clumsy remarks on rape but his focus on rehabilitation. With his enemies hoping he will shortly be reshuffled into oblivion, Mr Clarke must be wondering who his friends are. He should look across the Atlantic, where the first high-level protest against excessive imprisonment has been mounted not by slushy-minded liberals, but by paladins of the Republican Right.

One is Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives and a presidential hopeful. It would be hardly more startling to discover that Attila the Hun was an early advocate of the Human Rights Act than to learn that Mr Gingrich is now the US’s leading prison reformer. Among the other campaigners who bear no discernible resemblance to Elizabeth Fry is Grover Norquist, an architect of thumb-in-your-eye Republicanism who wants the state “shrunk down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”.

The US’s radical Rightists have not transmogrified into angels of mercy. Their fiscally driven mission is based on the $68 billion cost of maintaining a corrections system where inmate numbers are increasing 13 times faster than the general population. As Mr Gingrich wrote recently: “These facts should trouble every American.” More imprisonment, as he added, does not mean less crime. Those states, such as New York, that have jailed fewer people have also seen offences drop. With the majority of convicts reoffending, it is time, in Mr Gingrich’s opinion, to shut some prisons and rely on “more humane, effective alternatives”.