Inmates: The United States has surpassed Russia as the nation with the highest percentage of citizens behind bars.
By Scott Shane June 1, 2003, The Baltimore Sun
http://www.sunspot.net/news/printedition/bal-te.journal01jun01.story
With a record-setting 2 million people locked up in American jails and prisons, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country.
Today the United States imprisons at a far greater rate not only than other developed Western nations do, but also than impoverished and authoritarian countries do
Those are the latest dreary milestones resulting from a two-decade imprisonment boom that experts say has probably helped reduce crime but has also created ballooning costs and stark racial inequities.
Overseas, U.S. imprisonment policy is widely seen as a blot on a society that prides itself on valuing liberty and just went to war to overturn Saddam Hussein's despotic rule in Iraq.
"Why, in the land of the free, should 2 million men, women and children be locked up?" asks Andrew Coyle, director of the International Centre for Prison Studies at the University of London and a leading authority on incarceration.
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