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February 28, 2008

You’re 1 in 100 …

If you’re an inmate in an American prison. In what is primarily a shameful legacy of the failed “War on Drugs,” 1 in 100 U.S. adults is now behind bars.

Plus, our incarceration rate is far worse than even authoritarian nations. The far more populous nation of China ranked second with 1.5 million behind bars. Since China has four times our population, but only two-thirds of our 2.3 million prisoners, that means our incarceration rate is six times that of China’s.

The War on Drugs is shameful not only in its own right, but also because it has given credence to the casual use of “War on —“ for all kinds of inanities, including the “War on Terror.”

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