Awful milestone…

You thought I was going to talk about Iraq casualties, right? That’s awful enough. But how about this one:

"On Wednesday, Nov. 2, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released findings that the total number of adults under some form of American correctional supervision reached 6,996,500 last year. (To put this number in perspective, that’s more than the entire population of Israel.)

Last month, the BJS also announced a record-breaking high of 2.3 million incarcerated Americans, at a lock-em-up rate that outranks any other country in the world. Since 1995, in fact, the number of people imprisoned, or on parole or probation, has grown by over 1.6 million adults. One out of every 31 American adults is now under some kind of correctional supervision."

In the midst of all the other awful events we're facing, a considerable number of systemic problems only keep getting worse in the US. One of those has to do with the huge number of people in prison, many for small crimes. Consider this statistic:

"In Minnesota and Iowa, blacks constitute a share of the prison population that is twelve times greater than their share of the state population"

And the statistics above don't even talk about juvenile justice. These are issues we can do something about locally, they're not half a world away. And one very concrete way to get involved is simply to begin by getting to know someone in prison, or getting to know a family with someone in prison. If you worship in a church, you can meet someone.