S. during 2004 were actually at the lowest level in over three decades (U.S.).

Given the growing prison population, U.S. legal experts are urging policy-makers to reconsider current sentencing policies, in an effort to avoid expensive incarceration costs and to invest in more productive prevention and treatment approaches to crime (U.S.).

Many believe that prisons and incarceration have become the panacea for all of society's ills, and where once the U.S. looked to the welfare state to alleviate social problems, today it simply looks to prisons, and in particular the phenomenon of the prison-industrial complex, where capitalism flourishes from locking people in cages (History). Prison has become not only a class weapon, but an instrument of control, in particular the control of 'alien' populations, populations that were formerly colonized peoples, such as former slaves, Native Americans, Latin Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders, who all too often have been considered the...
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