1% of American adults are in jail, that's 2.3 million people or 1 in every 99.1 adults. Proportionally more than twice as many as South Africa, more than 3 times as many as the Iranians and more than 6 times as many as the Chinese. No society in history has imprisoned more of its citizens than the United States of America (by way of fairness the UK is also ahead of China, Turkey and India proportionally, with 148 prisoners per 100,000.)
The problem appears to be the "3 strikes" system - a legal system based on baseball. It seems quite bizarre to me. It's as if they thought people were having trouble understanding the law and asked themselves the question "what do people like?" - baseball! It means that if the first two crimes you commit are serious enough, the third one no matter how trivial will get a life sentence of 25 years or more. It means people can serve life sentences for shoplifting - it's astonishing. It marks me as particularly stupid because you know if you are on this sort of deal (on your last strike) that you might as well do something spectacular to earn your sentence such as a bank robbery or worse, I know I would.
Some more interesting statistics, 1 in 30 men age 20 to 34 are in jail, for black males that's 1 in 9 - there are more 17 year old black men in jail than in college. 5% of the world are American 25% of the world's prisoners are American.
It is also big business. It is illegal to bring into America anything that has been made by forced labour or prisons. But you could almost say that they have reinvented the slave trade. 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet proof vests, ID tags and other items of US military uniform is produced by American prisoners. 93% of domestically produced paints, 36% of home appliances, 24% of office furniture. This allows the United States to compete with factories in Mexico, because obviously the workers can't refuse to work for 25 cents an hour.
This system just seems so wrong on many levels. I'm wondering what how any politicians could go about changing this without being seen as "weak on crime"?
tl;dr - America has a dysfunctional justice and prison system, what can be done to change it?
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