Our prisons are filled mostly with violent people

In Slate Leon Neyfakh takes a look at our prison population. He interviews Fordham professor John Pfaff, who supplies some interesting statistics.

The U.S. prison population increased fivefold between 1980 and 2009—from approximately 320,000 inmates to 1.62 million.

...The fact of the matter is in today’s state prisons, which hold about 90 percent of all of our prisoners, only 17 percent of the inmates are there primarily for drug charges. And about two-thirds are there for either property or violent crimes.

... If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. So we’d still be the world’s largest incarcerating country; we’d still have an enormous prison population.

...the real growth in the prison population comes from county-level district attorneys sending violent people to prison.

Read more here.