"There are so many things amiss in the United States that one hardly knows where to begin discussing them all. Yet of all the calamitous situations faced by Americans, the cruelest by far is the criminal justice system. America is the world’s prison capital, and just one state, Louisiana, has an incarceration rate 13 times higher than China’s and 5 times higher than Iran’s.
Mass incarceration did not come about by happenstance, but was a coordinated and perfected reaction to the successes of the civil rights movement. Jim Crow was made illegal, so a legal means of destroying the black community had to be created."