The Prison Population

The United States of America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. There are more people locked up here than anywhere else. Americans don't make up even 5% of the world, but 23.4% of the world's prison population.

Do you know who is filling (and rotting in) our prisons? Our minorities.


The US Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2009, 39.4% of our prison population was comprised of non-hispanic blacks. Non-hispanic blacks make up only 12.9% of the US population.
Hispanics made up 20.6% of the prison population in 2009 and 16.3% of the US population.
This  means that per 100,000 US citizens, 4,749 black males were locked up, 708 white males, and 1,822 hispanic males.

The face of crime in America is a black man. One in four black men between 18-35 will serve time.

What is with the disproportionate figures?

There are many factors contributing to this issue. Minorities are typically the ones being marginalized by our education and social systems; this discrepancy leads to crime and violence in desperate neighborhoods. In fact, the majority of inmates are functionally illiterate (can't even fill out a job application). America's "War on Drugs" is also putting minorities behind bars--not because minorities partake in more drug use than whites-- it is quite the contrary-- but because it is more visible (on the streets where police already regulate as opposed to behind closed suburban doors). Most alarmingly, black men go to prison because it has become a cultural norm in their communities. Going to prison brings a man notoriety in his neighborhood. The more we lock people up, the more acceptable we make it culturally.


How is this impacting our communities?

People who have committed felonies lose the right to vote. Are we silencing our minorities? In some states, as many as one in four men of color have lost their right to vote forever, meaning this particular demographic's voice is being drowned out.

Black men who go to prison are fathers, husbands, neighbors, and sons. Because they are in prison, they are not making money for their families, their skill sets are not being used, and their communities are dealing with their absences. They leave behind single mothers who need to care for their families alone. They leave behind children who will fall victim to the same animal.

Worst of all, racism is not an arbitrary player in all of this. Police admittedly put more of their resources into dealing with crimes in areas where it can be easily found. "Police go looking for crimes in the ghetto, and that's where they find them," GWU sociology professor William Chambliss says. Additionally, African American men still receive a sentence on average 6 months longer than a white man's for commiting the same crime, and are more frequently pulled over and targeted in raids.


It seems that in order to reverse these injustices, we need to look at the root of the problem. Systemic problems such as lack of education, lack of community autonomy, and lack of resources, are clearly impacting  these statistics, as is the institution of racism.
By putting more emphasis on success in school and programs for workforce development, and putting resources in these communities and in general breathing life and making whole these quite stagnant, at-risk living situations, we could give people the opportunity to break the cycle. Allowing returning citizens basic rights also seems democratic and just.

The fact that we even have a term--"prison population"-- is vile. If we put more resources into public schools, job trainings, mental health facilities, etc, in the first place, we would not be pumping so many resources into a "population" of our society that cannot contribute anything to counterbalance it's own cost. But that's another post...


--Megan