1 in 100 American adults is in prison, according to a new study by Pew. 1 in 100. And that vastly understates the depth of the problem. Confine your sample to adult men and it's one out of 54. Confine it to black men and it's one out of 15. Many of these men have, of course, committed grave crimes. But many haven't. Many have been swept up in our ill-fated, poorly conceived drug war. And many have committed minor infractions that the richer -- and let's be honest -- the whiter among us regularly get away with. Reihan Salam comments:Economists Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote found that sentence length in vehicular homicides varied dramatically according to victim characteristics. What does this mean, exactly? Because vehicular homicides tend to be fairly random, you'd think victim characteristics would matter very little. It turns out, however, that offenders are given far longer sentences for killing women rather than men and whites rather than blacks. We're not talking about victims with criminal records or victims in the drug trade, etc. Rather, we're talking about random innocents mowed down in the street. To put it crudely, it seems pretty clear that the criminal justice system values some lives less than others. Not shocking news, of course. But it should be.Mike Huckabee likes to say that we're locking up a lot of people we're mad at rather than scared of. But we're also locking up a lot of people whose profiles we're scared of. And that we should be ashamed of.
