It's his position against the drug war that makes Ron Paul so volcanically controversial here on DU.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

68. There's a BIG difference between modest growth and EXPLOSION

And there's no need to be RUDE.

Don't you see the decline in the incarceration growth rate in your own graph in the late 70s?

And the acceleration after 1980?

See, for example, http://www.albany.edu/scj/documents/Sabol_ManagingPopulations.pdf :

"As has been well documented, the size of correctional populations in the United States, especially, the U.S. prison population, grew dramatically during the past 30 years. The number of offenders in U.S. prisons increased five-fold from about 320,000 in 1980 to 1.6 million in 2009 (West, 2010). The total number of adults under correctional supervision (on probation or parole, in prison or in jail) increased four-fold from 1.8 million in 1980 to 7.3 million in 2008 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010), so that by the end of 2008, about 3.2% of adults in the U.S. (or one in 31) were under some form of correctional supervision (Glaze and Bonczar, 2009)."