Hillary Clinton has a complicated history with incarceration. As first lady, she championed efforts to get tough on crime. “We need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” Clinton said in 1994. “The ‘three strikes and you’re out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets,” she added.
Today, 1% of US population in prison and they have 70-100% occupancy guarantees. A May 2015 Daily News article quotes Bill Clinton talking about his role in helping to create this monster.
“The problem is the way it was written and implemented is we cast too wide a net and we had too many people in prison,” Clinton told CNN. “And we wound up … putting so many people in prison that there wasn’t enough money left to educate them, train them for new jobs and increase the chances when they came out so they could live productive lives.”
How many people are in prison today?
According to the NAACP, from 1980 to 2008 the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled – from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people. Today, the US is 5% of the World population and has 25% of world prisoners.
From The Pew Charitable Trust report COLLATERAL COSTS: INCARCERATION’S EFFECT ON ECONOMIC MOBILITY,
The Pew Center on the States reported in 2008 that more than 1 in 100 adults is now behind bars in America, by far the highest rate of any nation.1 The direct cost of this imprisonment boom, in dollars, has been staggering: state correctional costs quadrupled over the past two decades and now top $50 billion a year, consuming 1 in every 15 general fund dollars.2
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