whitebeard

Don't curse the darkness, light a candle.

The New American Apartheid

Going to Prison Becoming the Norm for Blacks and Latinos
... In fact, while blacks constitute only around 12% of the U.S. population and about 13% of all monthly drug users (and their rate of illegal drug use is roughly the same as for whites), they represent 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession and 74% of those sentenced to prison on drug charges.

One method of measuring the extent of the incarceration of racial minorities is to look at the percent of the adult population incarcerated at least once in their lifetime.  According to a Department of Justice study, in 1970, less than 1 percent of all whites had experienced a term in a federal or state prison, compared to 4.5 percent of all blacks and 1.3 percent of all Latinos.  About 10 years later (1986) whites were still less than 1 percent likely to go to prison, but over 5 percent of blacks and two percent of all Latinos were.  By 2001, the latest estimates available, whites still had a low percent of ever going to prison (1.4%), but almost 9 percent of blacks and over 4 percent of Latinos did.

For white males born in 1974, the chance of going to prison stood at only 2.2 percent, but it was 13.4 percent for black males and 4 percent for Hispanic males. 

The entire article

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