[Note: Friends of Justice is a personal blog. I speak only for myself.]
“The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other developed country. The American incarceration rate is roughly 3.5 times as high as the median rate in Europe, according to a 2013 report from the European Council of Annual Penal Statistics. This is not because Americans commit more crimes — victimization rates in the United States are comparable to those in Western Europe. Nor is our outsize prison population solely the product of our drug war. As the Marshall Project notes, 54 percent of the 1.3 million Americans in state prisons are there for violent crimes. Even if we freed every nonviolent offender in an American prison, we would still jail a far higher percentage of our residents than do our European peers.”
Read the article by Eric Levitz in New York magazine.
