United States faces challenges in the 21st century

University of San Diego assistant professor of sociology, Thomas Reifer, lectured Wednesday about the challenges the United States faces in the 21st century.

"I thought one of the things that was most impressive about [the lecture] was its range," Rebecca Saunders, English professor, said. "One of the things that Professor Reifer was trying to do was to carry on an integrated approach that brought together a number of different kinds of social and political problems and inequalities and finding the relations between them rather than dealing with them individually."

One of the challenges Reifer talked about was the growth of the prison population in the United States.

"It's hard to keep up with the statistics," Reifer said. "The other day, I was telling my students that over one in every 136 persons in the U.S. are in jail. A study came out the next day that said over one in 100 adults in the U.S. are now in jail, including 33 percent of all young black men under the age of 29."

"My own state of California, the most popular state in the country, has either already, or is about to spend more [money] on prisons than on higher education," Reifer said. "The studies indicate very clearly that young black males not graduating from high school or college are 60 times more likely to end up in prison than their white counterparts."

Reifer also talked about how the United States got into war with Iraq and the consequences of the war.

"[The Bush administration said,] 'After 9/11, we can no longer wait for threats to materialize,'" Reifer said. "Instead of embarking on a global non-proliferation policy, [the Bush administration] came up with a new policy of counter-proliferation, which is essentially this: The U.S. reserves the right to attack select countries that we don't like and say are adversarial as a way of dealing with problems of proliferation."

"The Bush administration said over and over again, 'There is no doubt that [Iraq] has weapons of mass destruction.' That was a knowing falsehood," Reifer said. "We now know, after the fact, that there was huge dispute, for example, about the aluminum tubes. The entire department of energy said these things cannot be used for nuclear weapons, but there was one person in another agency who thought they could, and since his intelligence corresponded with the argument the administration wants to make, the administration went with him."

Reifer contrasted the attitudes of Americans in regards to Iraq with the genocide in Darfur.

"New statistics by the Oxford Research Bureau indicate that the deaths in Iraq may be over a million," Reifer said. "In one situation, in Darfur, the U.S. labeled that as a genocide, and there's a huge amount of activism on our campus, but it is a little bit strange that there's a lot of activism around Darfur, which we have less control over, whereas in a country that we are now occupying, and you have all this sectarian violence going on in the government, there's much less globalization."