AMERICA INCARCERATED
The United States is the most violent industrialized democracy in the world. The cost of goods or property stolen or spoiled due to crime amounted to fifteen billion dollars in 1991. In addition to this, the U.S. spent over twenty billion dollars on corrections in the same year. Our country had the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation in the world, nearly twice that of the former Soviet Union. Eighty percent of our state and federal prisons are at one hundred percent or more capacity. In fact, if the entire correctional population comprised a separate state, it would rank twenty-first in the nation by population, slightly larger than Louisiana but just a bit smaller than Minnesota.
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