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Wednesday, February 11th, 2015

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Author:     Leon Neyfakh
Source:     Slate
Publication Date:     Feb. 6 2015 6:30 PM
 Link: Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?
Stephan:   The United States runs the biggest gulag in the world. We have five per cent of the world's population and 25 per cent of the world's prisoners, many living in conditions that blatantly violate the 8th Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment. The assumption of many is that most of these people are there because of the War on Drugs. It turns out it is not that simple, and that is not correct. This article will give you information supporting a very different perspective. Very thought provoking.
Grotesque over-crowding is commonplace in America's gulag. Credit: sf.newleaderscouncil.org

Grotesque over-crowding is commonplace in America’s gulag.
Credit: sf.newleaderscouncil.org

Criminal justice reform is a contentious political issue, but there’s one point on which pretty much everyone agrees: America’s prison population is way too high. It’s possible that a decline has already begun, with the number of state and federal inmates dropping for three years straight starting in 2010, from an all-time high of 1.62 million in 2009 to about 1.57 million in 2012. But change has been slow: Even if the downward trend continues, which is far from guaranteed, it could take almost 90 years for the country’s prison population to get down to where it was in 1980 unless the rate of decline speeds up significantly.

What can be done to make the population drop faster? Many reformers, operating under the assumption that mass incarceration is first and foremost the result of the war on drugs, have focused on making drug […]

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1 Comment

  1. John Gabriel Otvos on Wednesday, February 11, 2015 at 4:13 am

    There is one idea not discussed in this article about the high incarceration population. We’ve read that more and more prisons in individual states are privately run and maintained. Those states must collect taxes, to pay for these for-profit corporations, to continue this activity. We’ve also read here in this site, that some states were verging on the edge of bankruptcy, like CA, due to the increase in money flowing out to maintain the prison system and prison population. With corruption at all levels in government, perhaps there is a judicial corruption that needs prisoners to populate a prison system?