Hillary Rodham Clinton (Democratic presidential candidate), said, "It's a stark fact that the United States has less than five percent of the world's population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world's total prison population."

"The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago despite the fact that crime is at historic lows," Clinton added.

Sen. Rand Paul, Republican presidential candidate, said, "Though only five percent of the world's population lives in the United States, it is home to 25 percent of the world's prison population. . Not only does the current overpopulated, under-funded system hurt those incarcerated, it also digs deeper into the pockets of taxpaying Americans."

Rounding off, both statements are true.

The United States population was 319 million as of July 4, 2014, according to the U.S. Census. That accounts for about 4.4 percent of the approximately 7.1 billion world population, which confirms the first part of this claim.

There were 2.24 million prisoners in the United States as of Dec. 31, 2011. That accounted for about 22 percent of the global prison population (10.2 million). About half the prisoners in the world were in the United States, Russia or China.

The numbers are more startling using a different measure in the report: the prison population rate. Criminologists say this is a reliable way to compare incarceration practices between countries. The United States had the highest prison population rate in the world, at 716 per 100,000 people. More than half of the countries and territories had rates below 150 per 100,000.

The United States also had a much higher rate compared with other developed countries: about six times Canada's rate, between six to nine times Western European countries, and between two to 10 times Northern European countries.

Public policies enacted in the 1970s through the 1990s led to stricter federal sentencing laws, more enforcement and more imprisonment. Mandatory sentencing laws also contributed to longer sentences. These policies were intended to reduce crime by keeping people behind bars, or deterring them from crime through the possibility of lengthy prison terms. Prison also became a means to treat a host of mental and physical health issues and drug abuse, said Inimai Chettiar, director of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Changing climate change

Rep. Lamar Smith made several incorrect claims in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece regarding connections between climate change and severe weather.

In the op-ed titled "The Climate-Change Religion," Smith, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, criticized the Obama administration's recent focus on combating climate change. Smith wrote that a connection between worsening storms and climate change has been "widely debunked," and that the United Nations doesn't believe that warming is related to "more severe weather disasters."

Both claims are incorrect. There is some evidence linking climate change to worsening hurricanes, droughts and other disasters. He mentioned an oft-repeated claim that there has been a "lack of global warming over the past 15 years."

Though the rate of warming has slowed, the world does indeed continue to warm, and cherry-picked data underlie the claims that warming has stopped. Smith quoted an InterAcademy Council report as saying the U.N.'s climate reports had "significant shortcomings in each major step" of the U.N.'s assessment process. That's misleading. The report found that though there is certainly room for improvement, the U.N.'s process has been "successful overall."

Chip Tuthill is a longtime Mancos resident. Website used: www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com.