The facts about imprisonment in the United $tates are that the United
$tates has been the world's leading prison-state per capita for the last
25 years, with a brief exception during Boris Yeltsin's declaration of a
state of emergency.(1) That means that while Reagan was talking about a
Soviet "evil empire" he was the head of a state that imprisoned more
people per capita. In supposedly "hard-line" Bulgaria of the Soviet bloc
of the 1980s, the imprisonment rate was less than half that of the United
$tates.(2,3)

 To find a comparison with U.$. imprisonment of Black people, there is no
statistic in any country that compares including apartheid South Africa of
the era before Mandela was president. The last situation remotely
comparable to the situation today was under Stalin during war time.

 The rednecks tell MIM that we live in a "free country." They live in an
Orwellian 1984 situation where freedom is imprisonment.

 

Notes:

1. Marc Mauer, "Americans Behind Bars: The International Use of
Incarceration 1993," The Prison Sentencing Project, 918 F. St. NW,
Suite 501, Washington, DC 20004 (202) 628-0871 Reference: SRI: R8965-2,
1994

 2. Ibid., 1992 report.

 3. United Nations Development Programme, "Human Development Report 1994,:"
Oxford University Press, p. 186.

 4. Figure of 51.2 percent for state prisoners there for non-violent
offenses. Abstract of the United States 1993, p. 211.

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