The criminal justice system in America was created to keep communities safe, to respect and restore victims, and to return offenders who leave prison to be self-sufficient and law-abiding. What the system has become is a monumental failure that our states and nation can no longer afford

“With so many of our citizens in prison compared with the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities: Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different– and vastly counterproductive.”

- Since 1984, America’s prison population has quadrupled from 580,000 to 2.3 million -Though the U.S. accounts for 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. accounts for 25% of the world’s reported prisoners

Approximately eight percent of the prison population in America is female. The needs of women prisoners are mentally, physically, and academically different from that of men. Typically two out of every three women in prison are mothers – leaving innocent children “outside” – and close to four percent of female prisoners arrive pregnant.

-Local, state, and federal spending on corrections costs the U.S. taxpayer about $68 billion annually* -16% (350,000) adults in prison or jail are mentally ill -

According to The Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), there was one psychiatric bed available for every 300 Americans in the 1950s. Today, they say there is only one for every 3000 Americans and many of these are in state prisons.

Nearly 10 percent of young African American men are behind bars and inside prison they disproportionately represent more than 40% of U.S. prison populations. Civil rights lawyers and academics question the reasons behind this racial disparity, research pointing to harsher sentencing for similar crimes, local crime-prevention programs like stop- and-frisk, the obstacles former- incarcerated men face once released, and the human rights struggle for current and former inmates.

3/4 of drug offenders in state prisons are non-violent offenders or in prison solely for drug offenses -47.5% of all drug arrests in the U.S. were fore marijuana offenses -

Despite insignificant statistical differences regarding drug use among races, Blacks (accounting for 12% of the U.S. population) account for 37% of all drug arrests, 59% of which are convicted and account for 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison

The growth in criminalization has led to no measurable decrease in recidivism despite increasing our prison population tenfold. Government employment in criminal justice has grown by 1 million employees since 1980,

In September of 2011, Ohio became the first state in the nation to sell a state prison facility to a private prison company first state in the nation to sell a state prison