Via Moyers & Company:
A report issued last week by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General found that the federal prison population has increased so rapidly over the past dozen years that the high costs of housing all of those convicts is draining the agency’s budgets for fighting crime, combatting terrorism and protecting Americans’ civil rights.
The US leads the world in imprisoning its citizens, and one of the reasons for that are our long mandatory minimum sentences for those caught up in the drug war. Awareness of the costs of these policies — in human as well as budgetary terms — has been increasing i...
