VLVL US-Prisons

[Otto]

"Since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, the former No. 1 jailer, the
United States has run neck-and-neck with Russia in the race to become the
world leader in rates of imprisonment. We lock up six times as many citizens
per capita as England, seventeen times as many as Japan. Prisons and jails
in the United States now hold nearly two million people, meaning that one
out of every hundred and forty residents is behind bars. In the nineties,
while Wall Street was booming, a third of the black men in this country
between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine were either incarcerated or on
probation or parole."
http://www.tedconover.com/newyorker.html