Abstract
The explosive, continued growth of America’s incarcerated population is now well known. Given the war on drugs, mandatory sentencing, and other “get tough on crime” measures, there are now over 1.5 million prisoners and over 750,000 jail detainees in the United States. America’s incarceration rate (737 per 100,000 people) is significantly higher than any other industrialized nation (Pew Charitable Trust, 2008). Despite the fact that the U.S. economy is in recession and states are struggling to fund an increasingly expensive corrections system (now over $60 billion annually), the U.S. prison population continues to grow, up nearly 2% in 2007. By the end of this year (2011), the nation’s prison population is projected to reach 1.7 million people (Pew Charitable Trust, 2007).