MAPUTO - The Open Society Foundation (OSF) has warned Mozambique to avoid the mistakes committed by the United States in combating crime and violence.

In a document called "Assessment of Crime and Violence in Mozambique," commissioned by the OSF and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA), the OSF says that the stress on law and order rather than on crime prevention is vastly expensive and does not work, in the Southern African country.

The Mozambique News Agency (AIM) said Thursday that in the United States, politicians pushed for more prisons and longer prison sentences, and the result is that although only about 5 percent of the world's population lives in America, 25 percent of the world's prisoners are incarcerated in the country's prisons.

According to AIM, OSF takes the US state of Louisiana as example and said that its imprisonment rate is three times that of Iran, seven times that of China, and ten times that of Germany.

In the city of New Orleans,  on any given day one out of every 14 black men are in jail. But throwing such large numbers of people into prison has not made the United States safe, says the OSF document.

Rates of violent crime in the US remain significantly higher than in other industrialized nations, the Mozambique News Agency quoted OSF release as revealing.

"Over a million Americans are victims of violent crime each year. An American woman in her sixties is more likely to be murdered than a young French man in his teens or early twenties," says the document.

The economic costs of imprisonment are startlingly high, and since even American budgets are not infinitely elastic, said the document.  "Money spent on keeping citizens in jail is money not spent on useful or productive parts of the economy."

Giving an example, the release said, the state of California alone spends around 8.8 billion dollars a year on its prison system.

The OSF notes that, during the 1990s, the state of Mississippi built 16 new prisons yet no new four-year college or university has been built in that state for 50 years.

In California, 21 new prisons but just one new state university were built between 1984 and 1994. Money spent on prisons "is money that is not spent on schools, hospitals and roads," the OSF points out.

"It is critically important that Mozambique and other African nations should not repeat the mistakes of the Americans," warns the OSF.