Since Congress created mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes in the 1980s, the federal prison population has grown from 24,000 prisoners to over 214,000 prisoners – the largest prison system in the country.The United States has more people behind bars – 2.3 million – than any other country in the world.
One in every 100 Americans is in prison or jail.Sentences for both nonviolent and violent crimes have grown at roughly the same rate, costing taxpayers billions: prisoners released in 2009 served sentences that were, on average, 36 percent longer than those of offenders released in 1990.
(The Pew Center on the States) Over 2.7 million children have a parent behind bars in the
This is historical material “frozen in time”. The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.
