Rethink the Land of the Free Incarcerated

The U.S. leads the world in many things that elicit pride, but incarceration is not one of them. As of 2021, 629 out of every 100,000 Americans were behind bars, the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world. Cuba, an authoritarian regime that imprisons people for “pre-criminal social dangerousness,” has a lower percentage of its people in jails. America’s incarceration rate is twice as high as Russia’s, not to mention seventeen times higher than Japan’s. If the U.S. prison population were a city, it would be the fifth-largest in the nation—more populated than Atlanta, Miami, Cincinnati, and Memphis combined. Black and Hispanic people make up almost 60% of the prison population, despite accounting for roughly a third of the U.S. population. And all those prisons cost more than $80 billion per year to maintain.

We must rethink this. Sentencing for nonviolent offenses should be re-evaluated, and prisoners with no history of violence should be considered for release. Drug courts, diversion programs, and other alternatives to prison should be expanded. Prison release should be accompanied by re-entry programs and education. Locking a young man away for a youthful mistake that harmed nobody and then dumping him on the street without any preparation years later merely compounds the problem. We broke criminal justice, and we need to fix it.

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Incarceration Rates

Per 100,000 people, August 2021

Source: World Prison Brief.