Five things everyone should know about US incarceration - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

27.3.13

Five things everyone should know about US incarceration - Opinion - Al Jazeera English: In the next few weeks, the US Congress will likely pass gun control legislation. President Obama will sign it into law and both Democrats and Republicans will walk away feeling that they did something to stem the tide of gun violence. That something likely will be to increase the criminal penalties for transferring, buying and using a gun illegally.

It will not be the first time that Congress has skirted the real issue in favour of symbolic measures that "look tough" and make legislators look good by putting more people in prison for longer.

Since the late 1980s, the US federal and state governments have sold imprisonment as the solution to myriad problems that have their roots in much more complex social and economic conditions.

The criminalisation tendency is politically expedient. This "prisons-first" political culture has one big downside: it has created mass incarceration.

Here are five things that everyone should know about mass incarceration in the United States.