Political Quotes

“today in our country over 5\1/2\ million young people have either dropped out of high school or have graduated high school and do not have jobs. It is no great secret to anyone that without work, without education, and without hope people get into trouble. They get into destructive activity or self-destructive activity. The result of all of that is that, tragically, here in the United States today we have more people in jail than any other country on Earth. We have more people in jail than in the authoritarian Communist country of China, with a population over three times our population. Today the United States represents 4 percent of the world's population. Yet we have 22 percent of the world's prisoners. Incredibly, over 3 percent of our country's population is under some form of correctional control. According to the NAACP, from 1980 to 2012, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled from roughly 500,000 to over 2 million people. A study published in the journal Crime & Delinquency found--this is really quite unbelievable and quite tragic--that almost half of Black males in the United States are arrested by the age of 23. If current trends continue, one in four Black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. This is an unspeakable tragedy. It is something we cannot continue to ignore. But this crisis is not just the destruction of human life. It is also very, very costly to the taxpayers of our country.…”