I turned 40 this month. My mom wrote me a birthday poem a practice learned in prison when it was the best gift she could afford to deliver. It still is.
While the US represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners. Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost around $74 billion in 2007 according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.