People like myself say, 'Fix the problem. Put him in the general [prison] population. The moral prisoners will deal with him in a way we don't have the nerve to do. '
What defenders of the system typically fail to acknowledge is that the reason violent offenders comprise a fairly large percentage of the state prison population is because they typically receive longer sentences than non-violent offenders.
We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 247-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.
Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.
Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2. 1 million people. . . . We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.
The U. S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison.
It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.
The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system's most dramatic expansion.
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.
If all the Atheists & Agnostics left America, they'd lose 93% of The National Academy of Sciences & less than 1% of the prison population.
