Interesting article at the NYT today discussing the "lock 'em up" and don't waste time with educating them policy. Interesting factoid: "The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that a black boy born in 2001 had a 32.2 percent chance of doing time behind bars."
and most interesting:
Professor Raphael is wary of linking incarceration with income dynamics. Still, he agrees the trends are suspiciously similar. “In the 1970s, something changes,” he told me. “The increasing concentration of income at the top follows the incarceration rate almost perfectly.”
The whole article is interesting for those who care about what constitutes wise social investment and what may not.
http://www.nytimes.com/...