In 2001 the nation's immate population passed 2 million for the first time. In 1980 it was 500,000.
sentencingproject.org
4.6 percent of African American men are in prison, as compated to 0.63 percent of Caucasian men. Rates of recidivism for all prisoners are approximately 60 percent. Critics cite this as evidence that the system doesn't work. Some might praise this as evidence that the system by and large is choosing to cage people who would otherwise be committing crimes (and who, once released, do commit crimes).
Put another way, if you have two males, and you know nothing about them other than one has been in prison and the other one hasn't, then you know that the one in prison has a 60 percent likelihood of committing a crime while the one not in prison has less than a ten percent likelihood.
44 percent of those incarcerated in state and federal correctional institutions are African American; 36 percent are Caucasian, and most of the rest are classified as Hispanic. That means that nearly one million African Americans are in prison, and about 800,000 Caucasians are in there too. These figures do not include Bernie Ebbers, who as of press time had not yet been convicted or sentenced.
Much of the disparity appears to be due to crimes relating to drug dealing:
geocities.com
Whites make up most drug users, but African Americans are far more likely to be arrested and convicted for dealing or distributing drugs (and related crimes), and these crimes attract some very harsh sentences.
The majority of the 2 million prisoners (about 1.2 million) are in the slammer for what this Web site calls "non-violent" offenses:
cjcj.org
I wonder how they defined "non-violent", though.
The trouble with all of these statistics, IMO, is that they focus on the wrong thing. No one is seriously arguing that huge numbers of these nearly one million African American prisoners were innocent. Some undoubtedly were, but likely not most. Many probably pled guilty.
And the fact is that the crime "rate" is going down, or at least has stabilized significantly over the past several years. Many attribute this to "demographics"....fewer young males in the population, and they are the ones who produce criminals at a high rate. I wonder, though, how much of the reduced crime rate resulted from incarcerating 2 million people convicted of crimes instead of 500,000 (the number only 20 years ago). If the recidivism rate is 60 percent, and we have four times as many of them in the cages, why isn't this a good thing for society? |
