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"Those are alarmingly high numbers. There are social, economic, educational and family risks associated with arrests. And we all have to be worried about that."
~Dr. Eugene Beresin, a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School.
If you met a man who had been married and divorced 8 times and he said the problem is that there just aren't any good women left out there ... which of these two conclusions are you likely to come to:
A) He's right. A good woman is hard to find and it seems reasonable that he would have 8 failed marriages given that obvious fact.

B) It's not the women. It's the man who has been divorced 8 times.
So - when 41% of all Americans have been in jail at some time by the age of 23 ... with a very disproportionate distribution to blacks and latinos ... do you think it's the kids or do you think it is the system that allows for that?

Myself - I have been put in jail once in my life. I was 17 years old playing basketball at 11pm in the evening in Orange County, California. Someone called the cops and had me arrested because unbeknownst to me ... the park closed at 10pm. So - I am also one of the 41%. But - Americans really like their police state; we hug it tightly like a warm blankey.

ABC News shares the study HERE:
By age 23, up to 41 percent of American adolescents and young adults have been arrested at least once for something other than a minor traffic violation, according to a new study published today in the journal Pediatrics.

The study gives no indication of how many of these young people committed violent crimes versus how many were rounded up for more minor infractions, such as disturbing the peace. But the study's authors say such a high percentage of arrests may point to a host of potential health and behavioral problems that put young people at risk for criminal activity.
The New Civil Rights Movements adds HERE:
No major news outlet questioned why - as in, since when did we start putting our children in handcuffs for childhood transgressions, like fistfights, or kissing a classmate, or for helping a homeless woman, or for burping?

In fact, in New York City, one student is arrested every day, and - big surprise - 94% are black or Latino, continuing NYPD Chief Ray Kelly's war on minorities.

In short, America's youth are being arrested at rates that have almost doubled since 1965.

Surely, an America that has been fueled by post-9/11 PATRIOT Act funds that have paid for para-military police forces might have some affect on the tremendous increase in the number of arrests we're seeing?
We wrote about America's incarceration addiction HERE; a snippet:

  1. There is a tremendous imbalance in terms of the ratio of whites, blacks and Hispanics.
    Despite the huge population of incarcerated people it is far from a representative portion of the population. While the national average is 1 in 100, only 1 in 106 is a white male. Shockingly, 1 in 15 Black men are incarcerated. This is like 2 people out of every classroom. Comparatively 1 in 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated fully 300% more than their white counterparts.

  2. America has 25% of all the world's prisoners

  3. It is a big business for private prison systems

    4. We wrote about this in our article Private prison company offers to buy 48 states' prisons for $250 Million
  4. It costs you money - lots of money
As we've shared HERE nearly 1 million prisoners are working for slave wages in prison on behalf of Fortune 500 companies:
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.