Nobody in the world loves locking people behind bars as much as Americans do. As we noted previously, we have more people in prison than any other nation on the planet. We also have a higher percentage of our population locked up than anyone else does by a very large margin. But has all of this imprisonment actually made us safer? Well, the last time I checked, crime was still wildly out of control in America and for the most recent year that we have numbers for violent crime was up 15 percent. The number of people that we have locked up has quadrupled since 1980, but this is not solving any of our problems. Clearly, what we are doing is not working.
Here is U. S. imprisonment rate per 100,000 people since 1880:
This post was published at Zero Hedge on 05/20/2016.
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