MAY 22 UPDATE ON THE US GULAG PRISON SYSTEM

May 22 Update on the US Gulag Prison System - by Stephen Lendman

Earlier this year I wrote and had posted on VHeadline.com (and many other sites) an article titled The US Gulag Prison System - The Shame of the Nation and Crime Against Humanity. Let me briefly update two statistics in it just reported today in the Wall Street Journal.

I reported earlier the brutal US prison system mostly encages nonviolent offenders many or even most of whom should never be there in the first place. They are there because laws were invented to be sure they were put there. Two-thirds of those affected are poor people of color, mostly black, in a nation priding itself on being a democracy. In fact, it's quite the opposite as I've written about in many articles. It's a nation weaned on violence and racism and always directed against those least able to defend themselves or be able to stand up for the rights they're denied. I've called my country a democracy for the privileged few alone and no one else - and I'm one of the privileged, but one committed to speak out against the intolerable injustices I see happening without end.

In my earlier article, I reported the US prison system was the largest in the world - greater than China's with four times our population and a government not known for its commitment to tolerance. The most up to date total of our prison population when my article was posted was 2.1 million with about 900 new inmates added each week. As disturbing as those numbers are, I can report we now have passed 2.2 million with about 1,000 new human beings being put in cages every week. The Journal also reported one in every 136 US residents are now behind bars. From my research and knowledge about our prison system, I find all this appalling and shocking. I hope VHeadline readers do as well.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.