There is no other society in the history of humanity that has imprisoned more people than the United States. With only five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. houses twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners. That is more than the top thirty-five European countries combined. As a proportion of its total population, America incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany and 12 times more than Japan . Moreover, sixty percent of that correctional population is black or latino.
Our obsession with locking people up in America doesn’t come cheap. States spend more than fifty billion dollars a year on their correctional systems. This does not include the tens of billions of dollars spent by the federal government to police, prosecute, and imprison individuals. Last year, the Department of Justice’s budget was nearly thirty billion dollars with six billion dollars going to the federal bureau of prisons. Our tax dollars support a vast network of prisons, jails, immigration detention centers, and associated personnel that maintain over seven million people under state and federal supervision. By comparison, in 1965 there were 780,000 adults under correctional authority of any type.
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