Kashmir and Imprisonment by the Numbers

I. Kashmir by the Numbers
12.5M - Population of Kashmir in 2011.

67% - Percentage of Kashmiris who are Muslim.

70K - Estimated number of lives lost in the last 30 years of conflict in Kashmir.

4K - Estimated number of politicians, activists, and students detained since India revoked Kashmir's special status on August 5.

600K - Estimated number of troops in Kashmir.

10K - Number of Kashmiris who protested in early August. (Source: Molly Minta, The Nation, January 13/20, 2020.)

II. U.S. Imprisonment by the Numbers
$338K - Cost per year to house an inmate in New York City's jails.

161% - Increase in the annual cost to jail a person in New York City over the past decade.

42% - Increase in use-or-force incidents and allegations in New York City's jails this fiscal year.

1.44M - Total state and federal prison population in the United States in 2017.

162K - Number of prisoners in the U.S. serving if  sentences in 2016; in 1984 that number was 34,000.

6x - Estimated incarceration rate in the U.S. for black men born in 2001 compared with white men born the same year.

O - Number of countries that incarcerate people at a higher rate than the U.S. does. Source: Shirley Nwanbwa, The Nation, December 30, 2019/January 6, 2020.)

III. The Free College Try
Public college should be free because we have the money. The total cost of public college tuition and fees in 2017 was $76 billion. Federal spending on college  financial aid in 2017 was $160 billion.

We just spend it on wealthier students, as tax breaks are the biggest subsidy, after student loans. Tax-based aid going to undergraduates in 2013, based on the lowest to highest quartiles is as follows: $3.3 million ---   $7.3 million --- $9.3 million --- $9.8 million. (Department of Education; Congressional Budget Office; Consortium for Higher Education Tax Reform; and The Nation, January 13/20, 2020.)

Mike Konczal has crunched the numbers and found that just 1 percent of students at public institutions hail from the wealthiest 1 percent.

ADDENDUMS:
*An analysis of seafloor mud off the shore of Santa Barbara reveals that between 1945 and 2009 plastic levels in the ocean doubled every 15 years.
*Next year Texas will produce more electricity from wind than from coal.
*British wind farms, solar panels, and renewable biomass plants produce more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time since the UK's first power plant fired up in 1882.
*Investing $1. trillion in climate mitigation and adaptation over the next decade could yield $7.1 trillion in social and environmental benefits, according to the Global Commission on Adaptation.
*Climate change could push more than 120 million people into poverty by 2030 and undo the past 50 years of progress in global health, says the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.