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Sunday, June 11th, 2017

What’s hidden behind the walls of America’s prisons

Author:     Heather Ann Thompson
Source:     Salon/The Conversation
Publication Date:     Thursday, Jun 8, 2017 03:30 AM PDT
 Link: What’s hidden behind the walls of America’s prisons
Stephan:   The American Gulag is an international humanitarian disgrace. The lives of two million three hundred thousand men, women and, yes, children are controlled by the gulag, as I write this sentence. More than that approximately 1 of every three people living in America have criminal records. No other nation on the planet even comes close to those numbers or proportions. And the whole thing is blatantly racist. Here is the latest on this growing trend, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his master Donald Trump will make much worse if they have their way.

Credit: Reuters/Fred Thornhill

Few Americans fully appreciate just how many of their fellow citizens are ensnared in the criminal justice system.

Some may have heard that there are about 2.3 million people behind bars, but that figure tells only part of the story. Yes, in a stunning array of 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 901 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails and 76 Indian Country jails, as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers and prisons in the U.S. territories, we physically contain more human beings than any other country in the world. In addition to those actually locked up, there are another 840,000 Americans being supervised on parole and an additional 3.7 million people being monitored on probation.

Consider this: The world’s most populous city, Tokyo, and the U.S.‘s most populous state, California, have fewer residents combined than the up to 100 million U.S. citizens who now have a criminal record.

As important, these historically unprecedented rates of containment, and the deep stigma of a criminal record, aren’t experienced equally […]

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