The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many of those people deserve to be in prison; however, some of them do not.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. 'America, land of liberty and freedom?' You know, that's baloney. More than 2 million Americans are behind bars now. Communist China has four times the population and they have 1.5 million people behind bars.
At least 80 percent of American prisoners are grossly over-sentenced. The Supreme Court knows this, but shows scant concern for this human side of criminal justice.
Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.
Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.
The claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: For the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted and jailed.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.
If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.
The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.
The world is a penal institution.