I agree with the vast majority of what you said. The statistic I sited is mentioned and discussed here but comes from a more scholarly article which I have been unable to access the full text to.

The study was based on data up to 2010, so it's a bit outdated, but as discussed in the linked article, more recent reliable stats are pretty hard to find. The 8% referenced includes all Americans with felony convictions, even those who served their sentence without going to prison.

Here's another interesting article from the Bureau of Justice Statistics which discusses an American's likelihood of being incarcerated at some point in their lives. If you are black, your odds are about 28.5% according to the study, while a white person only has a 4.4% chance. This study provides an overall chance of 5.1% that you will go to prison, but breaks it down ever further by race and gender. As a woman in her mid-thirties, I only have a .8% chance of going to prison.

So while your number of 1 in 4 is accurate for one demographic, it doesn't hold if you average the population as a whole. That in itself is incredibly alarming and demonstrates how skewed the laws and application of law is here in this country.

Thank you so much for commenting. Are you from the US or elsewhere? I'm curious which laws you see as being punished differently.