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Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?

By Daniel Lazare, The Nation. Posted August 20, 2007.


With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners. How did the American criminal justice system go so wrong?

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See more stories tagged with: prison, justice system, sasha abramsky, incarceration rate

Daniel Lazare is the author of, most recently, The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy (Verso). He is currently at work on a book about the politics of Christianity, Judaism and Islam for Pantheon.

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