Joe Biden Is Aiming To End The Federal Use Of Private Prisons

Buffalo NY

Description

The US has 5% of the population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. The highest per capita prisoner rate in the world. The system is set up to incarcerate, which has major ramifications for even those that get out (such as 10+% of Florida’s electorate being felony disenfranchised (nonviolent drug possession can be a felony) in 2016, over 6 million disenfranchised across the states). There has been a 500% increase in the prison population over the last 40 years, while US general pop has risen ~40%. All evidence shows that the bulk of this change is not due to any change in crime, but to changes in law. Since the official beginning of the War on Drugs in the 1980s, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses in the U.S. skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to 452,964 in 2017. Today, there are more people behind bars for a drug offense than the number of people who were in prison or jail for any crime in 1980. The number of people sentenced to prison for property and violent crimes has also increased even during periods when crime rates have declined. https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/