Even knowing that the U.S. has the highest per capita rate of incarcerated individuals in the world, I found this stastistic startling:
Almost a quarter of the world’s prison population is locked up in one country: the United States.
One way to look at it is that a country offering so much freedom has to accept that people often use that freedom to make wrong choices. Another is to consider that we might need to rethink the war on drugs. Most of the prisoners are in on drug charges, and FBI statistics quoted in the story show that more people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2011 than all violent crimes combined.
