AMERICA’S prisons are not for claustrophobes. Since the early 1980s, when harsher sentencing laws were introduced, the number of people incarcerated in the land of the free has increased nearly five-fold—to 2.2m souls. The United States locks up its inhabitants at a rate of 670 per 100,000 people. By contrast, in most European countries, the figures hovers around 100; in Sweden it is 53. New charging guidelines announced on May 12th by Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s attorney-general, appear designed to maintain this high incarceration rate—and perhaps to run up the score.
Four years ago, Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney-general between 2009 and 2015, took steps to reduce the rate of imprisonment. Noting that it was “far from sustainable” and that “our system is in too many ways broken”, Mr Holder took aim at the remnants of the "war on drugs" and laws imposing mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offences. Mandatory minimums, Mr Holder said, were often “draconian”; prosecutors should crack down hard...Continue reading
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