No Longer the Land of the Free, but boy is it still the Home of the Brave!

If you do a web search of of incarceration rates (average number of people serving prison sentences per 100,000 people in the population), one thing remains constant for every source, and that is that the US has hands-down got the highest rates in the world. That means that the US has more prisoners per capita than Vietnam, Cuba, El Salvador, Jamaica, Congo, Uzbekistan, or Russia. It may even have more than China though accurate numbers are hard to come by for China. What does it say about a country when its state locks up more people more frequently than ANY other country? At the very least, it says that the country in question cannot legitimately call itself the Land of the Free, however it can definitely still call itself the Home of the Brave because to live there requires more and more bravery for every year that passes.