According to the Justice Department, between 1990 and 1995, we built 213 new state and federal prisons in this country. That comes out to an average of thirty-five prisons per year, or almost three new prisons per month. And that figure doesn't include new county jails or juvenile facilities.
The United States has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the free world. More than two million Americans are presently locked up, and the numbers continue to swell.
Yet vast as this subculture is, very little is known about it. Perhaps that is due to the fact that as a society, we've been in no hurry to lay claim to the prisoners in our midst.
— Robert Ellis Gordon, The Funhouse Mirror