American Convicts

In his book PERIL AND PROMISE, published in 1990, John Chancellor, one of America’s top TV newscasters, wrote: “America is losing its competitive edge in high technology, but it was the world’s leader in building prisons and filling them with convicts. In the last ten years, the United States overtook the Soviet Union and South Africa in what is called the incarceration race. Today, of every 100,000 Americans, 426 are behind bars. The rate in South Africa is 333; the Soviet Union, 268; Great Britain, 97. In the Netherlands, 40 out of every 100,000 Dutch citizens are in jail, a rate 90 per cent lower than that of the United States.” For my part, I have the greatest admiration for John Chancellor. Not only is he an intellectually courageous man, he is also one of those few admirable thinking American. A rarity, indeed, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Poch Suzara