Health care in many facilities is seriously inadequate. Physical and sexual abuse is common. There is a growing movement that feels that the United States is spending too much money on building prisons and putting people in jail - rather than focusing on other important and preventative issues such as education, health care, housing, rehabilitation and alternatives to incarceration. The state of California, for example, now spends more on prisons than on higher education , and over the past decade has built 19 prisons and only one branch university. The United States spends more on prisons and puts more people in jail than any other industrialized country in the world.
Many activists believe that the prison system unfairly targets women, minorities and poor people.
They refer to statistics that show that more than 60 per cent of people in jail are racial or ethnic minorities. In 1994, one in three black men between the ages of 20-29 were in prison, jail, on probation or on parole. Black men were 7 times more likely than white men to be in prison. In 1970 there were 5,600 women in prison - by 1996, there were 75,000. For them, these statistics show that minorities are unfairly targeted.