Where is 1% of the American adult population?

[Nystul]

I thought this is food for thought. Especially the question 'is this slavery?'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMFd0zDAW0

The "slavery" bit is a shallow understanding of the situation. People who are convicted of crimes are deprived of certain liberties in order to protect the general population. If we are to overlook that idea, we could just as well say they are being kidnapped and held hostage, or that people who are executed are being murdered (actually a lot of people do say that). But any way you look at it, it costs us a lot of money to keep them off the streets. The average cost for a state to hold a prisoner for a year is somewhere in the $25,000 to $100,000 range. For that money you can hire full time a skilled tradesman or a middle manager. These work programs only recoup a small portion of the expenses.

People in this country want to feel safe. The last thing a politician can afford is to be labeled soft on crime. So, for better or worse, we put a lot of criminals in jail for a long time. But it's also a symptom of a lot of problems we have with urban communities in general. Some sentencing guidelines may be ridiculous, but to really fix the "problem" would require fixing a whole lot of other problems first.