We are really good at punishment. Right?

After all, America has about 5% of the world’s population but about 25% of world’s incarcerated people.
We have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Over the last few decades, that number has skyrocketed, increasing over 400%.
Somewhere along the way, we started to think that being tough on crime meant being tough on criminals. But that’s not the same thing!
Incarceration is but only one piece of a much larger crime reduction picture and it’s an expensive one!
It costs far beyond just dollars; the cost is to prisoners, to families and children on levels of mental health, finance, behavioral problems, and to whole social groups - in particular the african american community.
Yet we struggle to address these costs, these consequences.
Is it perhaps because we have this habit of thinking of prisoners as something very external to society???? after all there are literal walls between them and society walls capped with razor wire and watched over by people with guns but we have to stop.

So how large of a problem is mass imprisonment really? well clearly a really large one

And although many believe that mass incarceration would reduce if we focus more on reform proposals that focus exclusively on drug and other nonviolent crimes the prison population forecaster website shows that even if every person in state or federal prison for a drug offense were released today, mass incarceration would persist. so let’s address it from another angle.

Violent Crimes
Studies have shown Long prison sentence have helped decrease crime in well known violent criminal neighborhoods but the effects on crime is still comparatively minimum.

Solitary confinement
Solitary confinement has shown to increase stability and violence in inmates, and is considered by international law to be torture, but in the US, it’s not