Land of the Free?

From the New York Times: Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment.
...
Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the article is crap. Once they move from stating numbers to analyzing them, the article goes downhill. The conclusion they come to is that the high incarceration rate is due to our democracy. Utter garbage. What they, not surprisingly, fail to mention is the privatization of our prisons and the rise of for profit prisons in the US over the same time period that the prison population started rising. They also don't mention the racist factor to our prison system. For example, while African Americans make up a small minority of our overall population, they constitute a much larger percentage of our prisoners.

So, just look at the numbers and ask yourself, are we really a free country?