WITH less than 5% of the world’s population, the United States holds roughly a quarter of its prisoners: more than 2.3m people, including 1.6m in state and federal prisons and over 700,000 in local jails and immigration pens. Per head, the incarceration rate in the land of the free has risen seven-fold since the 1970s, and is now five times Britain’s, nine times Germany’s and 14 times Japan’s. At any one time, one American adult in 35 is in prison, on parole or on probation. A third of African-American men can expect to be locked up at some point, and one in nine black children has a parent behind bars.
Bars and stripes
Advocates of tough justice point out that America’s crime rate has fallen as the incarceration rate has risen. Criminals who are locked up cannot mug law-abiding citizens, and the prospect of going to prison must surely deter some from breaking the law in the first place. All this is true, but only up to a point. In the 1980s expanding prisons probably did help slow the rise of crime by taking thugs off the streets. But mass incarceration has long since become counter-productive (see...
from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1Srv85L
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