Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ - New York Times
Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ - New York Times
From the Department of Bad Ideas With Bad Repercussions:
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
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