Bernie Sanders:
"It makes NO SENSE to me that the United States of America has more jails and prisons than colleges and universities."
Like that Poster on Bernie Sanders Facebook timeline page:
The United States is experiencing a major human tragedy. We have more people in jail than any other country on earth.
Major human tragedy ... is kind of an understatement ...
[...]
There were 2.3 million prisoners in the U.S. as of the 2010 Census. It's often been remarked that our national incarceration rate of 707 adults per every 100,000 residents is the highest in the world, by a huge margin.
[...]
To put these figures in context, we have slightly more jails and prisons in the U.S. -- 5,000 plus -- than we do degree-granting colleges and universities. In many parts of America, particularly the South, there are more people living in prisons than on college campuses.
[...] Localities spend tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner each year -- and often much more than that -- to house, feed and provide them with medical care.
[...]
--
The U.S. has more jails than colleges.
by Christopher Ingraham, washingtonpost.com -- Jan 6, 2015
What an institutional disregard of so much Human Potential, in the so-called Land of Opportunity.
Tragically, and to America's great shame, our out-sized Prison Population is very much disproportionately composed of people of color ...
[...]
And the social costs have disproportionately fallen on poor and minority communities
Today, minorities constitute 60 percent of the U.S. prison population. Men under the age of 40, the poorly educated, people with mental illness and drug and alcohol addicts are also over-represented.
Blacks in particular have been disproportionately arrested for drug crimes:
While incarceration rates for both Hispanics and blacks have risen much faster than they have for whites:
As a result of these trends, black men younger than 35 without a high school degree are now more likely in America to be imprisoned than employed in the labor market.
These disproportionate impacts extend to their children: As of 2009, 62 percent of black children under 17, whose parents had not completed high school, have had a parent in prison. The same was true for 17 percent of Hispanic children and 15 percent of white children (with similarly educated parents).
[...]
--
The meteoric, costly and unprecedented rise of incarceration in America
by Emily Badger, washingtonpost.com -- April 30, 2014
These institutionally-grown, very discriminatory trendlines are an Outrage, to all who believe in the American ideals of fairness, equality, and justice for all.
For his part Bernie Sander has called for an end of our For-Profit Prison System -- one of the forces, driving these these anti-American world-record-breaking trends:
We Must End For-Profit Prisons
by Sen Bernie Sanders, on dailykos -- Sep 22, 2015
Bernie Sanders also has proposed a thoughtful, multi-point Racial Justice plan, to begin to rollback and correct the damage done to people of color, on a daily basis -- by our still institutionally-racist so-called system of justice and selective law enforcement depts across the nation. Here is a summary of that plan:
Physical Violence Perpetrated by the State
by jamess -- Sep 26, 2015
It makes NO SENSE ... that we spend MORE to imprison and warehouse people
-- than we DO on Educating and gainfully Employing people.
Makes no human sense, at all.
One might call it "tragic" and even to our great national shame.