Re: You know your prison population is too high...
We have a serious problem with privately run prisons. Like any free market business, they need to grow every year to stay profitable. Thus more and more inmates represent the way to keep this a growth industry. We now have a higher prison population than any country in the world, including China.
The private prison industry are the ones who lobbied and got the three strikes law in place. I'm all for serious criminals being imprisoned, but the three strikes law removes one of the most important aspects of our legal system: the discretion of judges to look at a case and decide what the appropriate punishment for that particular individual is based on all the circumstances.