At least 3 people care about prisons

This is for Sarah, who is one of the above 3. Some interesting posts in the comments (if you ignore mine), but no direct discussion of _why_ prison reform is a political third rail.

I suppose indirectly there's some evidence however: many people say our massive imprisonment gets results, and the fact that the rest of the world isn't as unique as us explains why we need to imprison 1 out of every hundred adults. So what's to reform?

clipped from matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com Yikes: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners." Needless to say, we lead the world in imprisonment. This seems like a serious problem, especially when you consider Tyler Cowen's point that our prisoners face unusually dire circumstances by developed world standards.

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