It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.
Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.
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.
If all the Atheists & Agnostics left America, they'd lose 93% of The National Academy of Sciences & less than 1% of the prison population.
Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people. ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.
People like myself say, 'Fix the problem. Put him in the general [prison] population. The moral prisoners will deal with him in a way we don't have the nerve to do.'
The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.