But the law only benefits people convicted of federal crimes 90 percent of American prisoners are held in state prisons and local jails. even imprisons black men at a higher rate than South Africa did under apartheid.īut the number of Americans in jails and prisons-around 2.2 million-is now at a 20-year low and still falling, as crime declines and the FIRST STEP Act, signed by President Trump in December, has cracked open the door to parole for victims of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws passed in the 1990s. By that standard, the justice system of the United States, with more people behind bars than any other country in the world, doesn’t even measure up to the society under which Mandela lived, which in 1993 locked up its citizens at a rate of 368 per 100,000, compared to 655 in the U.S.
'No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails,” Nelson Mandela once said-and who should know better?-except perhaps Dostoevsky, who said the same thing a century earlier.
