Another powerful demographic force in the USA is the number of men who are ex-convicts: ""Few of us today are aware of the staggering size of this group. In a forthcoming study, Sarah Shannon, a sociologist at the University of Georgia, and five colleagues estimate that America’s criminal class (people with a felony conviction or prison time in their background) roughly quadrupled between 1980 and 2010 — from 5 milli…
That's an astounding statistic. I don't live in America, and I obviously don't run into a perfectly uniform sampling of society, but I'd guess way less than 1 in 8 people I meet have done something that deserves being thrown in prison.