Land of the Free, Home of the Incarcerated

Some of you may have recently read in that the US prison population has swelled sense the 70s to over two million. Just over one percent of America's adult population is now in prison. That's one out of every hundred adults.

Half of those are in prison for non-violent drug offenses, and minorities are vastly overrepresented in the prison system.

No other nation on Earth comes close to the number of inmates of the US, China being a distant second. Between 1920 and 1970, incarceration rates in the US ranged from 90-130 inmates per 100,000 residents. Our current incarceration rate, 714 per 100,000, is 40% greater than the nations with the next highest incarceration rate (Belarus, Russia). Our corrections sector of the economy employs more people than Ford, General Motors and Wal-Mart combined.

Our prison system has become big business. Some 200 billion dollars are spent annually on corrections at all levels of government, a four fold increase over the past 25 years.