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The US experience

• In the last 20 years, the prison population has quadrupled. There are 2 million people now behind bars, giving the US an incarceration rate five times that of other industrialised countries.

• In the same period, spending on prisons jumped from $4 billion a year to around $40 billion. California's higher education budget was cut by 3% over the past decade, while its prisons budget increased by 60%. Since 1984, California has built 21 new prisons and one new university.

• New York (the first state to enact mandatory minimum sentences) has spent $600 million on prison construction since 1988, while cutting $700 million from higher education. More than half a million people are directly employed by prisons. For every African-American man enrolled in a state university, five are incarcerated. For Latino men, almost twice as many are incarcerated as are at university.

• Mandatory minimum sentences mean it is common for people to get a longer sentence for selling a joint than those guilty of sexual assault.

• 60% of federal prisoners are in jail for drug crimes; 36% of those prisoners committed non-violent, minor crimes.

• Mandatory minimum sentences for crack are 100 times heavier than those for powdered cocaine, resulting in the jailing of huge numbers of African-Americans and Hispanic youth, the main users of crack.