INN

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Some 11 million people worldwide are currently behind bars. This number is steadily increasing: Between 2008 and 2011, the prison population grew in 78 percent of all countries; between 2000 and 2016 it showed an increase of almost 20 percent.

More than 3.2 of these 11 million people behind bars have not been convicted of anything—they are legally innocent people awaiting trial. One in five of these 11 million is incarcerated for drug-related offenses, 83 percent for simple drug possession. A report for the Task Force on Justice calculated that 4.4 billion people are excluded from the opportunity the law provides and 244 million people experience extreme conditions of injustice.

Despite being known as mass incarceration, it does not impact the masses on equal terms. “Othered” communities—whether African-Americans and Latinos in the US; Indigenous people in Canada, Australia and New Zealand; Roma people throughout Europe; poor people in the Global South—are targeted by and thus caught up in criminal justice systems at dramatically disproportionate levels, due to a matrix of historical and current realities driven by capitalist aims.

This is not only a global human rights crisis. It is also a profound global threat to peace and community safety, because prisons—an outmoded, un-innovative method of generating public safety and reducing crime—do not build safer communities or advance peace and justice.

It is imperative to tackle this worldwide calamity across national borders and boundaries by building global solidarity and promoting innovative practices from around the world.