“HBO kindly let us put up the full length on youtube check it out and let me know what you think.”
wrote Shane Smith, CEO of VICE, 3hrs ago. President Barack Obama sat down with VICE on July 16, 2015 at the El Reno correctional facility to discuss a growing human rights crisis in a Vice on ‘HBO Special Report: Fixing the System’. The documentary is available to stream for free for the next few weeks. Watch the VICE on HBO special, exclusively here:
‘America Incarcerated’: A Letter from the Editors, September 22, 2015 by VICE Staff – VICE.
“We think it’s somehow normal for black youth or Latino youth to be going through the system this way”
said Barack Obama (TIMESVIDEO) on July 16, 2015 at the El Reno prison, a medium-security penitentiary in Oklahoma. Obama stated that United states has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. This is actually true. The United States population is around the 321 million according to the U.S. Census, indeed making it around the 5% of the 7.1 billion of the world population. According to the World Prison Population List, the United States’ prison total constitutes a rate of 716 per 100,000 of the national population, making it pro rata by far the biggest user of prison in the world. Read more at the AskTheRightQuestion article here.
So how ‘broken’ is the system?
According to Al Jazeera, the United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Federal prisons are at 130 per cent capacity, with half of their population jailed for drug offenses. The United States spends $80 billion on keeping people incarcerated. And while crime rates have steadily declined over the past three decades, the prison population has quadrupled since 1980, with African-Americans and Latinos making up 60 per cent of prisoners – aljazeera.com.
Al Jazeera also had a special called on July 23rd, 2015 called ‘Fixing America’s ‘broken system.’ So are Obama’s reform plans the answer to this “broken” criminal justice system?
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Photo credit: VICE ON HBO.