Interesting article:

There are 2.2 million human beings confined in prison and jail cells in the United States tonight. About 500,000 of them are presumptively innocent and awaiting trial, the vast majority are confined by the government solely because they can't pay enough money to buy their release. This country has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners—the highest rate of human caging of any society in recorded history of the modern world. At least another 4.5 million people are under government control through probation and parole “supervision.”

Between 80% and 90% of people charged with crimes are so poor that they can't afford a lawyer. Twenty-five years into America’s incarceration boom, black people were incarcerated at a rate 6 times that of South Africa during apartheid. The incarceration rate for black people in the nation’s capital, where I live, is 19 times that of white people.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy

#massincarceration