Re: Obvious really.
Other countries seem to do just fine without shoveling hundreds of thousands of their citizens directly into their prison system. Yes, without the 95% plea bargain rate, the court system would be overloaded, but you're missing the point. If the US criminal justice system worked along the same lines as, say, Germany or France (both major industrial nations with large immigrant populations), they could close 5 out of every 6 prisons tomorrow. The trick to not overloading the courts is to not to criminalize so many of your non-violent citizens in the first place -- decriminalizing pot possession would be an excellent start, for example.
Even conservative politicians agree than mandatory minimum sentencing has cause gross miscarriages of justice, with far too many people spending decades in prison for what were petty crimes. There are better ways to solve miscarriages of justice than to spend billions in taxpayer's money over-incarcerating thousands of petty criminals in the fear that one or two "crime lords" will avoid justice.
As for the Sixth Amendment, there are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of prisoners locked up around the country who have been waiting more than a year for their day in court. Prosecutors seem to have no problem with the Sixth Amendment when it comes to getting judges to agree to multiple postponements, as several high profile cases involving juveniles in the New York system shows.
Your arguments are based on fear mongering and little else. You need to explain why you believe the US needs to incarcerate many times more its citizens than any other western nation on Earth in the first place. Plea bargains are not the only problem, of course, but unless you believe Americans are many times more criminally inclined than people in other nations, you must agree there is something badly wrong going on with the US criminal justice system, and it's costing all American tax payers dearly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
