USA IS NUMBER ONE...for the number of people we imprision!

ONE out of every 100 people in the United States is imprisoned. Even though we are 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the prisoners in the world. We are number one in the world in the number of people we imprison - we even beat China. A normal reaction to this situation would be to try to reform our laws, our judicial system - including sentencing - our prison system and our society so that we would not have the disconcerting distinction of being the number-one jailer in the world.

Correctional facilities are big business these days and more and more of our prisons are being privatized. The people who are running these prisons are not interested in rehabilitating inmates or improving the system, but are focusing on putting the inmates to work and making prisons turn a profit. Really. Why would they want the penal system cleaned up and improved when they will lose all that nearly free labor? To read more, go here.

As it turns out, these privatized prison special interest groups are also some of the biggest lobbyists who spread their money around to keep social drugs like marijuana illegal. That's how they have filled up their prisons...with petty drug pushers and users. Read more about that here.

And it continues with this article from Truthout today, "America's Top Prison Corporation: A Study in Predatory Capitalism and Cronyism"       :

Just to set the stage as to how large the prison population is in the United States: our prison population is the highest in the world; one out of 100 US residents are in prison. This number has grown dramatically since 1990, due to tighter crime laws and longer sentences. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "Between 1970 and 2005, the number of people incarcerated in the United States grew by 700 percent. Today, the United States incarcerates approximately 2.3 million people."

Go here to read more.