A Quote by Michelle Alexander

Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.
The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system's most dramatic expansion.
The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison.
Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars, rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals' surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction and As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages.
I don't think we can reduce the prison population now, so many of these people are damaged goods once they've spent much time in prison. It would have to be over a generation. But certainly, yeah, white collar crime.
Since the end of the Second World War, our population has more than doubled to 27 million people.
Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row
It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.
The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000. I suppose they will all want dignity, I said.
The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.
The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.
The population of America is roughly 300 million and there are 300 million guns in this country, which is terrifying.
When President Nixon declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, about 110 people per 100,000 in the population were incarcerated. Today, we have 2-3 million prisoners: 743 people per 100,000 in the population. The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners. As Senator Jim Webb once put it, Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different and vastly counterproductive.
Well, I think that there's a clear record, I worked with Ronald Reagan in the early '80s and his recovery program translated into today's population of about 25 million new jobs in a seven-year period. As Speaker of the House, I worked with President Clinton and he followed with a very similar plan. And we ended up with about 11 million new jobs in a four-year period.
Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.
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