“The United States puts a greater percentage of its population in prison than any other developed country in the world. We persist in locking more and more people up despite the obvious fact that it doesn’t work. Even as we build more prisons and stuff them ever more tightly, the crime rate goes up and up. But we respond, ‘Since it isn’t working, let’s do more of it’! It’s about time we learned that fighting criminals is not the same thing as fighting crime.”—Richard Parker, radio commentary on CalNet, California Public Radio The primary issue here is whether reliance on imprisonment is an effective method of reducing crime the United States builds more prisons than any other country attacking the sources of crime (poverty, lack of education, etc.) will reduce crime more than just imprisoning people who commit crimes the United States imprisons more people than other countries the United States should realize that reliance on imprisonment is not an effective method of reducing crime