The figures are staggering. In the United States, 6.6 million people--one in every 32 U.S. residents--is in jail, on probation or on parole; 3,692 are on death row; 2 million are in U.S. prisons. That's 25 percent of the world's prison population....

JOSE VASQUEZ has a scar on his right cheek and a conviction for accidental manslaughter. Arrested at the age of 16, he was convicted as an adult and locked up for seven years in an upstate New York prison. He should have been...

The drugs used to execute prisoners in the United States sometimes fail to work as planned, causing slow and painful deaths that probably violate constitutional bans on cruel and unusual punishment, a new medical review of dozens of executions concludes.Even when administered properly, the three-drug...

“Drug abuse is a health, moral, and spiritual problem; it is time to stop treating it as a criminal problem.” —Doug Bandow, Christian Science Monitor, December 11, 2000 “For many addicted individuals, it is important to have...

Privatization of prisons means that instead of state and federal governments owning and administering prisons a private corporation operates and manages a prison for profit. The reasons for this development of private prisons are threefold and these three trends converged in the 1980's: the ideological imperatives of the free market, the huge increase in the number of prisoners, and the increase in imprisonment costs. It seemed that private enterprise could do any job the government had been doing cheaper a