America is not as conservative as the character of our government would seem to suggest. Our government has been skewed to the right on many fronts that tend to reinforce each other, making our government an ugly, funhouse version of the American people. The front I'm examining today has to do with the conservative demographic distortion created by our harsh sentencing laws and booming rural prison industry.
Manditory sentencing guidelines (now under review, thankfully -- we'll see where that leads...), "three strikes" rules and disproportionally harsh penalties for non-violent drug offences have caused an explosion of our prison population, nearly doubling it in the '90s. Cecil Adams over at The Straight Dope confims that "The only countries [China and North Korea] that might put away more of their own people than we do are both notorious authoritarian states."
The electoral concequences for this are explained after the jump:
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