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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
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.
More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.
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.
We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.
The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.
I think there are too many people in jail for too long and for not necessarily good reasons.
The most important issue is clearly not the quality of treatment and care of these prisoners; rather it is the perplexing issue of what we now do with them.
The United States is holding hundreds of suspected terrorists in prisons at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Many are locked up indefinitely. They have not been tried or even charged with any crime.
These people have served a longer sentence than some people who have committed murder.
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