If you are a male, 26 years of age, you have a one in four chance of incarceration on any given day.
When I was a 26 year old male I was an active freeper.
My life experiences watching guys I knew from school, work, socially go through the meatgrinder that is the legal/prison industry in NJ/NY has turned two entire generations against the ‘rule of law’ as has been dictated to us in our lives.
As this recession turned into a lost decade, the few remaining people our age living inside the bubble look more and more like gerbils to a larger and larger majority of the population. A population that is no more or less criminally inclined than any prior generation, but burdened with millions of pages of new laws and regulations that all result in imprisonment and/or probation/supervisory sentences.
Worse yet, this attitude is also held by the vast majority of LEOs near my age too. Speed traps on gerbils bring in revenue. As LEOs in NJ/NY have fixed pensions that kick in early, large numbers of baby boomer LEOs are retiring every day (earlier than almost all private sector baby boomers and even most public sector baby boomers in comparison), being replaced with a new doctrinal attitude... etc.
Something is wrong with that statistic. If true it means the 26 year old has 75% chance of staying out of jail today. Another 75% chance of staying out tomorrow if he makes it through today. The chance of staying out of jail for a whole week would be .75 x .75 x .75 x .75 x .75 x .75 x .75 = 13%. Continue for a month and the odds of staying out of jail drop to one in 5,000.
Your math confuses me too. Do you mean 25% of the 26 year olds are locked up? What about the 25 or 27 year olds?
While your overall point is a valid one, this statement is simply not true.