We currently have just under 80,000 heinous felons locked up in England and Wales, of whom about one hundred are probably trying to escape at any one time, god knows how many are rioting, and let’s not even talk about the showers. I know, soft target, but I couldn’t help myself. Which is something you might hear in those showers, I suppose.
Moving on.
143 per 100,000 of the population of England and Wales is in Jail (135 in Scotland); the highest rate in Western Europe. But that’s nothing compared to the United States, where a prison population of over 2 million means over 700 in every 100,000 of the population are banged up.
If you look at the global picture, you end up with around 9 million imprisoned souls. On that sort of scale, as just a number, it’s very hard to comprehend what we’ve done; that as a global society, at one time in its existence, has sought to collectively exclude 9 million of its number by placing them under lock and key. We don’t want thee people around us. We want to protect ourselves from them. We want to punish them for perceived wrong-doings. We want to try to force them, through the oppression of exclusion, to change. And we throw them all into a giant oubliette, letting a few out now and again, depending on the severity of their wrongs, only to replace each freed person as they leave. And while all of these are understandable, it’s almost unfathomable that there should be nine million of them.
So to make it a more comfortable number, I had to find an equivalent. It turns out that the population of Sweden is a smidge over 9 million (according to the US Census Bureau). I’m not sure how much comfort there is in that.
The BBC has a whole section covering prisons in the UK if you want to read more.
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