A woman who killed, dismembered and cooked her husband, then ate his body parts, told a parole board: "I am not a monster."

Omaima Nelson, 43, sought parole after 20 years behind bars, but the board rejected her request and she will remain in state prison on a term of 27 years to life for second-degree murder.

The hearing did give Nelson an opportunity to discuss the gruesome crime at a Costa Mesa apartment in 1991.

She insisted that her husband, William, was trying to strangle her when she hit him with a lamp, stabbed him with scissors and killed him.
"If I didn't defend my life, I would have been dead. I'm sorry it happened, but I'm glad I lived," said the one-time model from Egypt. "I'm sorry I dismembered him."

She denied eating her husband, despite testimony by her psychiatrist at her trial. "I swear to God I did not eat any part of him. I am not a monster," she said.

Orange County prosecutors opposed her release, saying she was still a danger to society.

The United States of America has an incarceration rate of 743 per 100,000 of national population (as of 2009), the highest in the world. In comparison, Russia has the second highest 577 per 100,000, Canada is 123rd in the world with 117 per 100,000, and China has 120 per 100,000. While Americans only represent about 5 percent of the world's population, one-quarter of the entire world's inmates are incarcerated in the United States.

I would imagine that also means that almost everyone knows at least someone who's been in jail, but then the jailbirds are probably predominantly parts of certain groups. Young black males for example.

About 10.4% of the entire African-American male population in the United States aged 25 to 29 was incarcerated, by far the largest racial or ethnic group—by comparison, 2.4% of Hispanic men and 1.2% of white men in that same age group were incarcerated. According to a report by the Justice Policy Institute in 2002, the number of black men in prison has grown to five times the rate it was twenty years ago. Today, more African-American men are in jail than in college. In 2000 there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college. In 1980, there were 143,000 black men in prison and 463,700 enrolled in college.