“ Over the last five decades, the incarceration rate in the United States has exploded. In the 1960s, the United States incarcerated its population at a rate that was comparable to other developed countries. Today, America ranks among the most punitive states in world history — second only to the Soviet Union under Stalin. Black men born between 1965 and 1969 have been more likely to go to prison than to graduate from college. American punishment is thus of unprecedented severity — more prisoners per capita than ever before, and more so than any comparable country in world history. It is also characterized by extreme inequality — some Americans are much more likely to languish in prisons than others. These are its twin features. What explains them?” The Economic Origin of Mass Incarceration
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51