Peter Moskos Quote
From 1925 to 1975, despite some variance, about 1 in 1,000 Americans was imprisoned at any given time. In 1975, there were approximately 200,000 prisoners. Thirty-two years later, after thirty-two years of drug war, there are 2.3 million behind bars—1 in every 130 Americans.100 Canada, by comparison, imprisons 1 in every 750 people. Every country in Western Europe imprisons still fewer. Pick any country and we lock up more people. America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. This, in Eric Schlosser’s coinage, is the prison-industrial complex:
Peter Moskos
From 1925 to 1975, despite some variance, about 1 in 1,000 Americans was imprisoned at any given time. In 1975, there were approximately 200,000 prisoners. Thirty-two years later, after thirty-two years of drug war, there are 2.3 million behind bars—1 in every 130 Americans.100 Canada, by comparison, imprisons 1 in every 750 people. Every country in Western Europe imprisons still fewer. Pick any country and we lock up more people. America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. This, in Eric Schlosser’s coinage, is the prison-industrial complex:
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About Peter Moskos
Peter Moskos is an American professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration and the CUNY Graduate Center in the Department of Sociology. He is a former Baltimore Police Department officer. The son of military and Greek American sociologist Charles Moskos, he specializes in policing, crime, and punishment. Moskos was listed by The Atlantic as one of their "Brave Thinkers of 2011" for his book In Defense of Flogging. In Defense of Flogging proposes giving individuals convicted of a crime a choice between incarceration and corporal punishment.