Legal Research

The United States leads the world in the number of its citizens who occupy its prisons.  We have 2.3 million inmates, .7 million more than China, which has four times our population.  Among adults, one in one hundred Americans is imprisoned.  While the high rate of incarceration has led to a decrease in the crime rate, there are those who question the extent of its impact. 

Interestingly, as an article in The New York Times for April 23 points out, one explanation for sentences that the rest of the world regards as disproportionate may lie in the fact that we are a democracy.  Since, unlike judges in the rest of the world, many of our judges stand for election, they are likely to be more responsive to public pressure for stiffer sentences.