As I scrolled through my Facebook news feed, I discovered the following artwork here, being shared by the page, “End the War on Drugs,” and originally posted it to my own wall, along with commentary…
!["This year's winner in prison population (prisoners in millions): USA - 2.0, China - 1.5, Russia - 0.8. The United States has less than 5% of the world's population, but nearly 25% of the world's prisoners. Let's meet the champions: (Three Strikes, and other mandatory sentencing laws, not higher crime rates, are responsible for the 800% increase in federal prison populations since 1970.) (Louisiana, has the highest incarceration rate with 1619 per 100k residents, more than 2x the national average. Nearly 2/3 of their prisoners are non-violent offenders. This is largely due to the laws voted into effect by voters.) (Private prisons, are the for-profit prisons that hold over 10% of all federal prisoners. The problem: they spend millions each year lobbying for stricter sentencing laws to increase their profits.) Share better. Share this. Upworthy."](http://acidrayn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/2012-08-20-Land-of-the-Free-You-Say-450x484.jpg)
“This year’s winner in prison population (prisoners in millions): USA – 2.0, China – 1.5, Russia – 0.8. The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners. Let’s meet the champions: (Three Strikes, and other mandatory sentencing laws, not higher crime rates, are responsible for the 800% increase in federal prison populations since 1970.) (Louisiana, has the highest incarceration rate with 1619 per 100k residents, more than 2x the national average. Nearly 2/3 of their prisoners are non-violent offenders. This is largely due to the laws voted into effect by voters.) (Private prisons, are the for-profit prisons that hold over 10% of all federal prisoners. The problem: they spend millions each year lobbying for stricter sentencing laws to increase their profits.) Share better. Share this. Upworthy.”
My Commentary: “Land of the Free”?
(All original portions of this work, by Rayn Kleipe, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, while all redistributed links, images, sounds, videos, and writings are protected under 17 U.S.C. § 107: Fair Use, or under Public Domain)