Your elementary school class? One of them’s been in prison.

Quote of the Day: 1/31 Americans in correctional system.

Think of it this way: pull out your elementary school photo. One of your classmates? In the prison system.

Wanna save taxpayer money, GOP? Stop putting people in the slammer and ruining livelihoods and make. Pot. Legal. It’s harmless, more easily controlled, made safe in terms of point of sale, and taxable when it’s legal.

Legality same as morality. In other words, you can make something legal and tax and control it whether or not you think it’s right. When or not you think it’s right, it’s still happening.

Via Newsweek:

In 1980, fewer than 500,000 Americans were in prison; today, the number is 2.3 million.

To put that statistic in perspective, the median incarceration rate among all countries is 125 prisoners for every 100,000 people. In England, it’s 153; Germany, 89; Japan, a mere 63.

In America, it’s 743, by far the highest in the world.

Include all the U.S. residents currently on probation or parole, and our country’s correctional population soars to about 7.2 million—roughly one in every 31 Americans.

All told, the U.S. incarcerates nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, even though it’s home to only 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants.

That’s Newsweek’s Andrew Romano, writer of this week’s profile of Jim Webb and his “crusade” to reform the criminal-justice system.