The United States accounts for just 4.5% of the world’s population, but 23% of the world prison population. The U.S. has the highest prison population rate in the world: one out of 132 Americans are in jail or prison. One state that has concentrated on incarceration in its fight against crime is Kansas. But financial problems have led Kansas officials to reconsider their policies, particularly those relating to parole. Previously, Kansas had treated parolees harshly, routinely pinning them with electronic tags and testing their urine. By 2006, two-thirds of the people entering prisons in Kansas were guilty of parole violations, and 90% of those were for technicalities like missing meetings. Now case workers, instead of acting like cops without badges, are emphasizing integrating ex-cons into the community so that they won’t return to prison. Sally Frey, a re-entry specialist focusing on high-risk offenders, told the BBC, “At first some people accused us of being too soft, of wanting to ‘hug-a-thug.’ But you know the old ‘trail ‘em, nail ‘em and jail ‘em stuff doesn’t work.” Since Kansas changed its system, the number of crimes committed by parolees has been cut in half.