A quarter of the world’s prison population are American citizens, locked up in American prisons
The National Anthem of the United States proudly proclaims America as “the home of the free” but the numbers of incarcerated peoples in the U.S. has sky rocked since the 1980s. In fact, from 1920s to 1980 US incarceration numbers climbed steadily to about half-a-million prisoners Beginning in the 1980 and especially after the introduction of the “war on drugs” that number doubled every decade since then, so that now the so called “land of the free” imprisons more than 2 million of its own citizens—thats more any other country in the world.
Here are some shocking numbers.
Prison bar picture via flicker/wwarby