Here’s a dubious honor belonging to the United States: the world’s largest prison population.

The United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. American has a prison population of 2.3 million; second place on the list is China and it is not a close second but behind the United States with 700,000 people:

Top Three:

United States: 2.3m
China: 1.6m
Russia: roughly 850,000

The United States also holds the record for highest incarceration rate per 100,000 people at 756 to China’s 119; Russia is second with 629.

Think about this for a moment. China is an authoritarian country where criticism of the regime may very well land you in jail. This is a nation that only also for a filtered-Google. And, yet, it arrests and jails less of its people than the self-styled “leader of the free world.”

Why is that? Over-criminalization in the United States. Since the Johnson administration in the 1960s - when a “war on crime” was declared - there has been a huge increase in the federalization of crimes and mandatory sentences. Previously, what were offenses handled in state court and sentences open to prohibition have become federal crimes with mandatory jail sentences. More people are, naturally, pushed into prison.

And then there is the “war on drugs” started in the Reagan years. Nothing has increased America’s prison population than the harsh mandatory sentences required for even minimal drug possession and use. Otherwise law-abiding Americans who case no harm to anyone are treated like the worst sort of criminal all because they smoke marijuana in the privacy of their own homes.

The essence of liberty is that you should be allowed to do whatever you please as long as it is peaceful. If you don’t harm anyone with your actions, then you should not be prevented from engaging in them. Smoking marijuana while driving is clearly an offense because someone could be injured in such a situation. But smoking while confined to your home poses no evident threat. That is why it is so totalitarian that the U.S. government would engage in a declared against its own peaceful citizens all because it dislikes what they consume in their bodies. Supporters of drug prohibition argue that drugs cause dependence, family problems and lead to reckless driving. But so does alcohol and the number one toxic killer in America is not drugs but legal alcohol. All the social ills that come with drugs are tolerated with, say, vodka.

America’s “war on drugs” is a negation of liberty, an expansion of federal power beyond constitution writs, and a fiduciary burden. We are imprisoning a shameful amount of our people - more than any other nation - all to fight a futile war that should have never been waged.