quote for the day

The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and ­Britain - with a rate among the ­highest - has 153....

This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.

That something, of course, is the war on drugs.

Fareed Zakaria

Right here is why the movement towards privatization of Americas prisons is insane. We will never be able to reduce those numbers as long as there are corporations using their profits to pay lobbyists to maintain the Tough On Crime attitudes that got us into this mess in the first place.