Saturday, March 24, 2012

There are now more Americans in jail than there were in Stalin's Gulag Archipelago...

“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America - more than 6 million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain - with a rate among the highest - has 153....

This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Mother sentenced to TWELVE YEARS in prison for $31 marijuana offense...
  2. Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice...
  3. Everything is illegal in America...
  4. When we grow, the cannabis story...
  5. The " war on drugs" is a war on our consciousness...
  6. The war on drugs is immoral idiocy...

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