The "war on drugs" is responsible for a nationwide prison-building boom -- and those benefiting from the boom have lobbied to continue the war. That's the conclusion of an article appearing in newspapers across the country this week, written by Ronald Fraser of the DKT Liberty Project.

In a new report, "The New Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping America's Prison Expansion," Sarah Lawrence and Jeremy Travis found that the number of state prisons in the United States grew 73 percent, from 592 to 1,023, in the last 25 years. In that time, communities with prisons have benefited from extra jobs and extra federal subsidies based on an increasing population that does not draw services such as schooling and police protection. Even though most Americans in prison do not have the right to vote, congressional representation and electoral delegates are apportioned according to state population, which includes inmates.

The United States has more than 2 million people behind bars, by far a larger rate than reported by any other nation in the industrialized world.