{"id":8349,"date":"2012-04-07T12:50:12","date_gmt":"2012-04-07T11:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=8349"},"modified":"2012-04-07T12:51:15","modified_gmt":"2012-04-07T11:51:15","slug":"the-caging-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=8349","title":{"rendered":"The caging of America"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>&#8220;Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today\u2014perhaps\u00a0<em>the<\/em> fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system\u2014in prison, on probation, or on parole\u2014than were in slavery then.<\/p>\n<p>Over all, there are now more people under \u201ccorrectional supervision\u201d in America\u2014more than six million\u2014than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one.\u00a0No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is an extract from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/arts\/critics\/atlarge\/2012\/01\/30\/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all\">an article<\/a> in &#8220;The New Yorker&#8221; magazine earlier this year.<\/p>\n<p>To compare prison rates in the USA with other countries in the world, go <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today\u2014perhaps\u00a0the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system\u2014in prison, on probation, or on parole\u2014than were in slavery then. Over all, there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8349"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8355,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349\/revisions\/8355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}