Read and discuss the following article. Account for its title and do the exercises below it

Ex.5.11. Find in the article THE DECLINE OF THE ENGLISH BURGLARY words related to or describing crimes. Write them down, find their derivatives, give examples of their usage. Prolong the following table with these words.

Crime	Meaning	Verb	Criminal
discrimination	unfair treatment on grounds of sex, race or nationality	discriminate (against)	-
embezzlement	Stealing money that is in your care or belongs to an organisation that you work for	embezzle	embezzler
harrassment	Making a person feel anxious and unhappy (sometimes for sexual reasons, sometimes to get, say, a debt repaid)	harass	-
insider trading/dealing	illegal buying and selling of shares by someone who has specialist knowledge of the company	do/practice insider dealing/trading	insider dealer/trader
joyriding	driving around for enjoyment in a car you have stolen	joyride	joyrider
money laundering	Moving money obtained illegally so that its origin cannot be traced	launder money	money launderer
perjury	lying when under oath	commit perjury	perjurer
trespass	go into someone else’s land without permission	trespass	trespasser
e.g. shoplifting	Taking goods from a shop without paying for them	shoplift	shoplifter

Ex.5.12. Which of the crimes in the table above might each of these people be charged with? What will these people be called then?

1) A camper who spent a night on a farmer’s land without asking permission.

2) A businessman who diverted funds from the account of the company he worked for into his own personal account.

3) Two boys who hot-wired (=started without using a key) a car and drove it around town before abandoning it.

4) A witness who gave false evidence in court.

Reading 3

A bull market for prisons

More people will be locked up in prison in 1997 than ever before. The expense will be so great that taxpayers may soon start to complain; and the numbers so large that riot and scandal will inevitably push the drab world of prison life into the world's headlines over the next year. The United States has led the way. There are now five times as many Americans in prison as there were 25 years ago.

Tougher sentencing has also meant tougher prisons. The rising numbers have pushed many jails well beyond their theoretical capacities. Security levels are being ratcheted higher. And prisoners' access to privileges is being restricted. Austerity is the watchword. In America, it is virtually impossible to find a black­-and-white television anywhere except in prisons, where colour sets have been banned.

At first sight, this enthusiasm for imprisonment is surprising. Prison has a poor track record. It is hard to show any relationship between a society’s rate ofincarceration an its rate of cringe. Prison keeps some offenders off the streets, but it seems neither to deter nor to reform. Judged simply on its effectiveness, prison has been repeatedly condemned as a blunt instrument.

What explains its growing popularity? A major factor is undoubtedly the war on drugs, a war lost by governments across the world. Drug-related crime has also filled the prisons of Europe, bringing with it the attendant problems of HIV and other diseases.

But perhaps the key fact explaining the passion for imprisonment is that those who end up there are recruited disproportionately from minority groups. For most voters, law and order means the imprisonment of someone else. Blacks and Hispanics make up two-thirds of those behind bars in America, and up to 80% of new prisoners. In England and Wales, 17% of male prisoners and almost a quarter of female prisoners are from minority ethnic groups. The same pattern applies elsewhere: North Africans in French jails, Mollucans and Surinamese in the Netherlands, gypsies in Hungary, native peoples in Canada, aborigines in Australia.

Increasingly, prison populations have an international character. Some 30% of the people in French, Dutch and Swedish prisons are aliens. In Belgium, the proportion is over 40%. A survey in England and Wales found nationals of every country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

Most prisoners are young men. The proportion of women prisoners is nowhere greater than 10% (and is less than 5% in most countries), although the numbers of women in both Britain and America seem to be increasing faster than the numbers of men. Yet there is a massive difference in scale. The states of Texas and Oklahoma lock up as many women per 100,000 population as the number of men per 100,000 imprisoned in most of Europe.

America is now engaged upon a monstrous social experiment: nothing less than the mass incarceration of its young black male population. Although imprisonment rates in Russia - and almost certainly in China - exceed overall American levels, black Americans are seven times more likely to go to jail than whites. In Baltimore, for example, a majority of the city's young men are black and a majority of them are either in prison or on probation parole.

Texas and California together hold 20% of all 1.5m prisoners in the United States, Texas having an overall rate of imprisonment around 680 per 100,000, the highest official figure anywhere on earth. Despite the publicity which it has received, the policy of "three strikes and you're out" has had little effect except in California. By encouraging not-guilty pleas, mandatory sentencing rapidly increases the number of prisoners held on remand.

The American example has also been crucial in promoting the idea that jails can be contracted out to the private sector. But privatisation is making little headway. Only 2% of the American prison population are in private prisons, and apart from four in England and Wales there are no private jails in Europe. The world leader in privatised punishment is not America but Australia, where around a quarter of prisoners are in private hands. The companies concerned have been prospecting for contracts in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, but the public monopoly of punishment remains generally intact.

Will the prison boom continue? Only if the taxpayer is willing to foot the bill. Prison does not come cheap. In California, the cost of housing the state's prisoners will soon reach $5 billion a year. The punishment of criminals is like any other public good: you can have as much or as little as you want to afford.

But there are few signs yet of a rethink. Voters like politicians who talk tough. Offered this blank cheque, parties of both left and right are only too happy to oblige.

Ex.5.13. Find in the article above synonyms for:

1) to convict; 2) to take on; 3) foreign; 4) to outnumber; 5) appeal; 6) undamaged; 7) to please; 8) to stay away; 9) harshness; 10) total

Ex.5.14. Find in the article above antonyms for:

1) 1) to permit; 2) unimportant; 3) decline; 4) sharp; 5) minor; 6) to be expensive; 7)

Ex.5.15. Find in the article above words and expressions which mean:

1) putting or keeping sb in prison;

2) a citizen of a particular nation;

3) (infml) to be responsible for paying the cost of sth;

4) a word or phrase that expresses the beliefs or aims of a party or group;

5) to sent back to prison from a court of law, to be tried later after further inquiries have been made;

6) a part or share of a whole; a fraction;

7) a wild or violent protest by a crowd of people.

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