When it comes to locking people up, the United States is a world leader. The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet accounts for 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.
African-American people are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of white people.
A number of terms have been coined to describe systems that promote mass incarceration: Institutional racism, school-to-prison pipeline.
Now, there’s a word for how we might end it: Decarceration. ...