Why is the US prison population bursting at the seams?
How many Americans are in prison? The numbers are startling. Some 2.3 million Americans are in prison, while another 5.1 million are on probation or parole. Altogether, the 7.4 million people in the criminal-justice system outnumber the individual populations of 38 states. Prior to the 1970s, the U.S. incarceration rate was similar to that of other nations. But the U.S. inmate population has nearly tripled in the past quarter-century, making the U.S. incarceration rate the highest in the world—almost five times the world average, surpassing even China and Russia. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners in its jails. “The current American prison system,” said Brown University’s Glenn Loury, “is a leviathan unmatched in human history.” Why are so many people in jail? Rising crime rates in the 1960s led to decades of tough-on-crime politics, with legislators passing mandatory minimum sentences, “three-strikes” laws that impose length
