Apr. 3, Feature - One in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison according to a study recently released by the Pew Charitable Trust. At the start of 2008, over 2.3 million adults were held in American prisons or jails and the number increases daily with rising incarceration rates.

In Pennsylvania over 46,000 people are incarcerated. As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaign across the state, Andalusia Knoll looks at their stance on Corrections.

Barack Obama, in his historic speech on race, stated that discrimination has kept many Black people from achieving the American Dream.

"That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future."

This legacy of discrimination that Obama referred could be blatantly seen in disparate sentencing for crack versus powdered cocaine. Crack, whose usage is more prevalent in low-income black communities carried a sentence 100 times harsher than powder Cocaine which is more predominant in wealthy white communities. During the Brown and Black Democratic Presidential Forum last December Hillary Clinton said she supports changing this disparate policy.

"It is really unconscionable that someone who uses five grams of crack cocaine or compared to 500 grams of powder cocaine would face such disparate sentencing."

However Clinton voted against making this change retroactive. Obama said that he was in support of retroactively eliminating the sentencing disparity which would lessen the sentence of up to 19,500 prisoners.

While the U.S. Sentencing Commission did vote to retroactively eliminate the crack cocaine disparity, most recent criminal justice policy decisions have lead to increased incarceration rates according to Hide Yamatani, a researcher with the Center on Race and Social Problems at the University of Pittsburgh.

"We used to practice this rehabilitation-jail time paradigm and slowly public sentiment was so high just simply to lock them up and forget about services or trying to rehabilitate them."

Prison expansion has not been a key talking point for Clinton nor Obama as they campaign across Pennsylvania a state whose prison population is rising four percent every year. Donna Phender, President of Fight for Lifers, an organization that advocates for those serving life sentences, says prisons has become the new boom industry.

"Rather than look for other types of industry, prisons have become our industry, it's like people who don't have money for attorneys or they're undereducated end up in prison and the rest of the population are those that house them or police them."

After repeated requests neither Democratic Presidential candidate would issue a statement about their corrections policy.

Whoever wins the election in November will inherit an overburdened multi billion dollar Prison System with more than 2.3 million inhabitants.

For Election Unspun I'm Andalusia Knoll.