Consider the sizes of Alaska and Texas. Now consider their former and current leaders, respectively. SHRIGHT!

(Source: creepingjesus)

paxamericana:

• Minimum number of Texas residents under criminal justice supervision: 740,905
• Population of Washington D.C.: 571,641
• Estimated number of non-violent offenders imprisoned in Texas: 89,400
• Total prison population (both violent and non) of the U.K., the most incarcerated country in Europe: 82,241
• Number of Texas inmates who leave prison and return to their communities each year: 65,169
• Estimated number who will return to prison within three years: 23,070
• Number of state prisons built in Texas between 1980 and 2004: 94
• Total number of university campuses in Texas: 94
• Total number of state prisons in Texas (not counting jails, federal lockups, and juvenile facilities): 114
• Incarceration rate in Texas (inmates per 100,000): 704
• Incarceration rate in the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran, respectively: 117, 226
• Percent increase in Texas’s prison population between 1980 and 2004: 566
• Percent increase in Texas corrections spending between 1980 and 2004: 1,600
• Ratio of growth in Texas corrections to higher education spending between 1980 and 2000: 7:1
• Number of Texas black men added to the prison population vs. the college student population (1980–2000): 4:1
• Estimated portion of black children in Texas with at least one parent in prison on any given night: 1 in 14
• Estimated percent chance in 1950 that a black man born in Texas would go to prison during his lifetime: 3
• Estimated percent chance in 1996 that a black man born in Texas will go to prison: 29
• Approximate percentage of Texas’s overall population that is non-white: 40
• Approximate percentage of Texas’s prison population that is non-white: 70
• Rate at which blacks are incarcerated compared to whites in Texas: 7 to 1
• Total number of women prisoners in Texas: 14,031
• Total prison population (women and men) of Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Finland combined: 10,800
• Minimum number of Texas women subject to lifetime ban on food stamps because of a drug conviction: 4,700
• Estimated number of Texans imprisoned for marijuana possession alone: 3,000
• Rank of Texas’s spending on indigent criminal defense among fifty states: 50
• Rank of Texas in number of juveniles incarcerated in adult prisons: 1
• Rank of Texas in number of prisoners held in supermax control units: 1
• Rank of Texas in number of inmates shipped to private for-profit prisons: 1
• Rank of Texas in number of inmates sexually assaulted in prison (in both absolute and per capita terms): 1
• Rank of Texas in executions since 1977: 1
• Rank of Texas in executing juveniles and mentally retarded inmates before recent Supreme Court prohibitions: 1
• Number of exonerating DNA tests ignored by Texas’s highest court in upholding Roy Criner’s rape conviction: 2
• Number of times the Supreme Court rebuked Texas’s highest court for defiantly ignoring its rulings in 2004: 3
• Most recent year in which a federal judge ruled Texas prisons “unconstitutional…malicious and sadistic”: 1999
• Percent drop in Texas crime rate following a 139% increase in the prison population (1991–2001): 34
• Percent drop in New York crime rate following an 11% increase in the prison population (1991–2001): 53
• Estimated percentage of Texas prisoners with a substance abuse problem: 85
• Number of prison substance abuse counselors laid off in 2003: 100

Rick Perkinson (source) 

Above: Texas Death Chamber. Alan Pogue.