Bulging Jails Are Other American Exception: Albert Hunt
This article is for subscribers only.
One area where the U.S. indisputably leads the world is incarceration.
There are 2.3 million people behind bars, almost one in every 100 Americans. The federal prison population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and one in nine black children has a parent in jail. Proportionally, the U.S. has four times as many prisoners as Israel, six times more than Canada or China, eight times more than Germany and 13 times more than Japan.