Thursday, February 19, 2015

U.S. is Home to 5% of Population -- And 25% of the Prison Population?

   "The U.S. is home to five percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of the world's prison population." So says a statement from a new organization aiming to push for judicial reform. "With 2.2 million people currently in the nation's prison or jails -- a 500 percent increase over the past 30 years -- the system costs American taxpayers $80 billion per year. Mass incarceration is not making us safer but is contributing to racial tensions, fracturing communities and growing costs to taxpayers."
   What do we do, then? Let everyone go free, or at least a lot of them? For surely we don't want to be the most incarcerated nation on earth. No, not America, land of the free.
   It might be interesting to see what this new group, the Coalition for Public Safety, will come up with.


No comments:

Post a Comment