Post by Origanalist on Jul 27, 2014 19:45:53 GMT -8
Mass Incarceration: 21 Amazing Facts About America’s Obsession With Prison
By Michael Snyder, on July 27th, 2014
Nobody in the world loves locking people behind bars as much as Americans do. We have more people in prison than any other nation on the planet. We also have a higher percentage of our population locked up than anyone else does by a very large margin. But has all of this imprisonment actually made us safer? Well, the last time I checked, crime was still wildly out of control in America and for the most recent year that we have numbers for violent crime was up 15 percent. The number of people that we have locked up has quadrupled since 1980, but this is not solving any of our problems. Clearly, what we are doing is not working.
Nobody wants more crime. And it seems logical that locking more people up and keeping them in prison for longer terms would “clean up our streets” and make our communities safer. But instead, we have spawned a “prison industrial complex” that costs taxpayers more than 60 billion dollars a year but that does very little to turn the lives of the men and women inside around. The chart posted below is a bit old, but it shows that we have a massive problem with recidivism in this country…
So what should we do?
To keep people from committing the same crimes should we just lock them up even longer?
Should we penalize a young kid for the rest of his life for a non-violent mistake that he made when he was 19 years old?
Should we continue to tear apart families and communities just so that we can have the illusion of feeling a little bit safer?
Or could it be possible that there is a better way to deal with all of this crime?
The following are 21 amazing facts about America’s obsession with prison…
#1 There are more than 2.4 million people behind bars in America as you read this article.
#2 Since 1980, the number of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons has quadrupled.
#3 The incarceration rate in the United States is more than 4 times higher than the incarceration rate in the UK and more than 6 times higher than the incarceration rate in Canada.
#4 Approximately 12 million people cycle through local jails in the U.S. each and every year.
#5 Overall, the United States has the largest prison population and the highest incarceration rate in the entire world.
continued at...endoftheamericandream.com/archives/mass-incarceration-21-amazing-facts-about-americas-obsession-with-prison?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mass-incarceration-21-amazing-facts-about-americas-obsession-with-prison
By Michael Snyder, on July 27th, 2014
Nobody in the world loves locking people behind bars as much as Americans do. We have more people in prison than any other nation on the planet. We also have a higher percentage of our population locked up than anyone else does by a very large margin. But has all of this imprisonment actually made us safer? Well, the last time I checked, crime was still wildly out of control in America and for the most recent year that we have numbers for violent crime was up 15 percent. The number of people that we have locked up has quadrupled since 1980, but this is not solving any of our problems. Clearly, what we are doing is not working.
Nobody wants more crime. And it seems logical that locking more people up and keeping them in prison for longer terms would “clean up our streets” and make our communities safer. But instead, we have spawned a “prison industrial complex” that costs taxpayers more than 60 billion dollars a year but that does very little to turn the lives of the men and women inside around. The chart posted below is a bit old, but it shows that we have a massive problem with recidivism in this country…
So what should we do?
To keep people from committing the same crimes should we just lock them up even longer?
Should we penalize a young kid for the rest of his life for a non-violent mistake that he made when he was 19 years old?
Should we continue to tear apart families and communities just so that we can have the illusion of feeling a little bit safer?
Or could it be possible that there is a better way to deal with all of this crime?
The following are 21 amazing facts about America’s obsession with prison…
#1 There are more than 2.4 million people behind bars in America as you read this article.
#2 Since 1980, the number of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons has quadrupled.
#3 The incarceration rate in the United States is more than 4 times higher than the incarceration rate in the UK and more than 6 times higher than the incarceration rate in Canada.
#4 Approximately 12 million people cycle through local jails in the U.S. each and every year.
#5 Overall, the United States has the largest prison population and the highest incarceration rate in the entire world.
continued at...endoftheamericandream.com/archives/mass-incarceration-21-amazing-facts-about-americas-obsession-with-prison?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mass-incarceration-21-amazing-facts-about-americas-obsession-with-prison