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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.

Even though the Clintons started mass incarceration, which my brother is a victim of, things are going to change, though. Somebody made them do that.

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.

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.

For the past seven years we have been cracking down on crime in Missouri, passing tougher laws for drug crimes and sex offenses and requiring prisoners to serve more time.

Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone. Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill?

As a society we're always so quick and able to spend money on lawyers for someone for incarceration, but we don't make the corresponding commitment to the preventative components of it.

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.

Amnesty, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.