The numbers are frightening. Right now, 2.3 million Americans are behind bars. That’s 1 in 138 peopleTweet, and the majority are African-American and Latino.
It’s mind-boggling that the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country on Earth. Is the country overrun with evildoers?
Or are we are doing something different than, say, Canada, which has a population of 35 million and only 40,500 people behind bars. That’s 1 in 864. Even Iran, considered an oppressive nation, has but 218,000 prisoners. Its population is 77 million, making the number of those incarcerated 1 in 353.
The consensus at Nov. 10’s American Justice Summit at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York was: We are doing something exceedingly counterproductive — and it’s not sustainable.
As John Wetzel, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, said about incarceration and its aftermath, “Higher-risk offenders leave lower-risk. Lower-risk offenders leave higher-risk.”
[For more of this story, written by Lori Cohen, go to http://jjie.org/op-ed-theres-n...stice-system/107930/]
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