The Bail Trap, Nick Pinto, New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2015

“Criminal justice,” President Obama said in a speech to the N.A.A.C.P. last month, “is not as fair as it should be. Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it.” Two days after the speech, Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, meeting with convicts in a corrections institution in El Reno, Okla. The setting was dramatic, but mass incarceration isn’t actually a federal problem. Of the 2.2 million people currently locked up in this country, fewer than one in 10 is being held in a federal prison. Far more are serving time in state prisons, and nearly three-quarters of a million aren’t in prison at all but in local city and county jails. Of those in jails, 60 percent haven’t been convicted of anything…”