"The American prison system has no equal in any other country or any other epoch. Almost 2 million people sit in our prisons and jails each day. Another 3.7 million are on probation or parole. Hidden behind the system's vague abstractions — justice, law and order — is the fact that the overwhelming majority of America's current and former prisoners are very poor. By the time they reach their mid-thirties, almost seven in ten black men who didn't finish high school will have spent a portion of their life in a cage. Prison robs people of the prime of their life, taking not only the sleepy, slow years at the end but also the pulsing, hot years in the middle. In prisons, of course, they will remain poor, earning in their prison jobs between 14 cents and 1.41 an hour on average, depending on the state. The United States doesn't just tuck its poor under overpasses and into mobile home parks far removed from central business districts. It disappears them into jails and prisons, effectively erasing them: The incarcerated are simply not counted in most national surveys, resulting in a falsely rosy statistical picture of American progress. Poverty measures exclude everyone in prison and jail — not to mention those housed in psych wards, halfway houses, and homeless shelters - which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on."