{"id":108,"date":"2006-12-05T23:55:10","date_gmt":"2006-12-06T03:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/archives\/108"},"modified":"2006-12-06T00:04:20","modified_gmt":"2006-12-06T04:04:20","slug":"americans-in-jail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/2006\/12\/americans-in-jail\/","title":{"rendered":"Americans In Jail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The US DoJ issued a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ojp.usdoj.gov\/bjs\/pub\/press\/pripropr.htm\">report and press release<\/a> last week.  The headline: &#8220;One in every 32 adults was in a prison, jail, on probation, or on parole at the end of 2005.&#8221;  I struggle wrapping my head around that statistic.  Then you look at black men between the ages of 25 and 29, and one in 13 are in jail or prison &#8211; not even counting parole.   Can you imagine if out out of every 13 of your friends went to jail?<\/p>\n<p>What are we doing wrong as a society that such a high fraction of our population is monitored and\/or locked up?<\/p>\n<p>I believe our first mistake is the war on drugs.  The report shows that approximately 20% of state prisoners and 55% of federal prisoners are for drug offenses.  I&#8217;d be very interested to see those broken down into violent and non-violent crimes.  If we de-criminalize non-violent drug behavior, we will have a lot fewer people in the justice system.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not just the raw numbers of people in jail, either; it&#8217;s also the growth.  In the last 8 years, the number of federal drug offenders increased by 65%. (At that rate of growth, 50% of the country will be in federal prison for drug offenses by 2040!)<\/p>\n<p>Reports like this one show that our drug policy doesn&#8217;t make sense. It is time for us to revisit our drug laws.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The US DoJ issued a report and press release last week. The headline: &#8220;One in every 32 adults was in a prison, jail, on probation, or on parole at the end of 2005.&#8221; I struggle wrapping my head around that statistic. Then you look at black men between the ages of 25 and 29, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dandunn.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}