posted on Jun, 3 2003 @ 12:26 PM
U.S. prison population largest in world
With a record-setting 2 million people now locked up in American jails and prisons, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage
of its citizens behind bars than any other country.
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The latest statistics support that view. The new high of 2,019,234, announced by the Justice Department in April, underscores the extraordinary scale
of American imprisonment compared to most of the world.
During the 1990s, the United States and Russia -- a far poorer country emerging from totalitarian rule and beset by official corruption and organized
crime -- vied for the dubious position of the highest incarceration rate on the planet.
But in the last few years, Russian authorities have carried out large-scale amnesties to ease overcrowding in disease-infested prisons, and the United
States has emerged unchallenged into first place, at 702 prisoners per 100,000 population. Russia now has 665 prisoners per 100,000.
United States imprisons at a far greater rate than developed Western nations and many impoverished and authoritarian countries. On a per capita basis,
according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than
Tanzania and seven times more than Germany.
www.charleston.net...
My question is this: based on our current path of ultra-right-wing conservatism, how much worse do you think it will get? It's also important to
note, as with everything "righteous" these days, it's closely married to business - one of the fastest growing & most lucrative market segments of
the building industry is prison construction. The prisons, as is the case of where
I live upstate, are epicenters of blue collar industry - construction and on site staff jobs. That's not even accounting for the prison labor- near
zero cost workforce being applied towards state projects.