| Alan Singer, professor at Hofstra University in New Tork, has written a stunning brief history of the school-to-prison pipeline, looking at the role of schools in this process. He writes: "Since the early 1970s, the United States prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million. It is the largest prison population in the world. "Meanwhile, more than half of state prisoners are in jail for nonviolent crimes. Mass incarceration has destructive impact on families, communities, and state and local budgets. It cost $80 billion a year to keep all these people in prison and more than $250 billion to pay for all the additional police and court expenses. According to the human rights group Human Rights Watch, while prison should be a last resort, in the United States "it has been treated as the medicine that cures all ills."In 2000, over two million American children had a parent in prison..." |
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