Bob Shephered commented:
A few notes about “the land of the free,” from the NAACP:
Between 1980 and 2015, the number of people incarcerated in America increased from roughly 500,000 to over 2.2 million.
Today, the United States makes up about 5% of the world’s population and has 21% of the world’s prisoners.
1 in every 37 adults in the United States, or 2.7% of the adult population, is under some form of correctional supervision.
In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population.
African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.
The imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women.
Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US population, they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015.
If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40%.
In the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, about 17 million whites and 4 million African Americans reported having used an illicit drug within the last month.
African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites.
African Americans represent 12.5% of illicit drug users, but 29% of those arrested for drug offenses and 33% of those incarcerated in state facilities for drug offenses.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Those statistics are worth publicizing. Thanks to Bob and Diane for doing that.
I also recommend the following discussion about moving well beyond slogans and yard or street signs asserting that Black Lives Matter. Major policy changes are being avoided in favor of quick fixes.
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While we are less than 5% of the world’s population, we account for 25% of number of incarcerated. We have about 2.3 million people jail, a greater percentage than any other country. Many states have enacted unfair laws that that make it easier for people to go to jail simply because they are poor. If anything in our country needs an overhaul, it is our criminal justice system.
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Important post. Any discussion of police/criminal justice reform must include this issue. Prisons are a public function, there should be no profit related to them. As I tell everyone who’s interested (and sometimes not), there are two books on 21st century American public policy that must be read to understand our times: The New Jim Crow and The Death and Life of the Great American School System. If we can’t figure these out and move toward common sense solutions, I see little hope for our future. Every public issue is rooted in their arguments.
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a succinct summation: Every public issue is rooted in these arguments.
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Does anyone know (with a link) how many Americans (the total number) have served time in jail/prison due to the use of recreational drugs? I did some research and could not find any information on the total that have served over the last few decades since Republican Presidents Nixon and Reagan declared war on people that use drugs like pot.
It is easy to find the total that is still serving time but not easy to find out how many have served. By now, a significant ratio of the population must have spent some time behind bars for using illegal recreational drugs.
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This material is all from the NAACP’s Criminal Justice Factsheet, which can be found here: https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/
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