The Justice Dept. released new data yesterday on the state of our prison system, and it's unsurprisingly depressing.
A few highlights:
"The number of people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities grew 43 percent"
"In several states, incarceration rates for blacks were more than 10 times the rate of whites."
"The female jail and prison population has grown at double the rate for men since 1980; in 2006 it increased 4.5 percent, its fastest clip in five years."
One of these days, we're all going to release how inhumane this is. I hope.
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Adam Doster, a contributing editor at In These Times, is a Chicago-based freelance writer and former reporter-blogger for Progress Illinois.
