Our prison system is in need of major reform. Thought this was worth sharing. We have TWENTY FIVE percent of the world's prisoners. 25%. And we do nothing to rehabilitate those lives while they are locked up. Crazy.
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Thanks so much raising awareness about this issue.
Recently listened to this segment on democracy now:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/20/throwaways_recruited_by_police_thrown_into
New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman has just been awarded a George Polk Award for her article, "The Throwaways," which investigates law enforcement’s unregulated use of young confidential informants in drug cases. Stillman details how police broker deals with young, untrained informants to perform high-risk operations with few legal protections in exchange for leniency — and sometimes fatal results.
Also a very comprehensive article on the rise of the for profit prison system in America.
“No matter what the politicians or corporate heads might say, prison privatization is neither fiscally responsible nor in keeping with principles of justice. It simply encourages incarceration for the sake of profits, while causing millions of Americans, most of them minor, nonviolent criminals, to be handed over to corporations for lengthy prison sentences which do nothing to protect society or prevent recidivism. This perverse notion of how prisons should be run, that they should be full at all times, and full of minor criminals, is evil.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/prison-privatization_b_1414467.html
"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today -- perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system -- in prison, on probation, or on parole -- than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America -- more than six million -- than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height." -- Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America"
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