Number Four: Increased Incarceration Rates (The New Jim Crow)
If you haven’t read the book “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander, go buy it and read it! This book was by far the clearest breakdown of stats that demonstrate the mass incarceration tendency in Black America. Below are just a few stats from this great book:
- The United States imprisons more people than any other country
- The U.S. has more than 2.4 million behind bars, an increase of more than 500 percent in the past 30 years
- It has 5 percent of the world’s population; 25 percent of its prisoners
- People of color represent 60 percent of people in cages
- One-in-eight black men in their 20s are locked up on any given day
- 75 percent of people in state prison for drug conviction are people of color although blacks and whites see and use drugs at roughly the same rate.
I helped put together this “Stop and Frisk Handbook” because there was a disproportionate amount of people of color being pulled over and arrested for doing nothing but standing. Laura Coates also put out, You Have The Right… to inform you from a legal perspective.
People with arrest records have a harder time getting employment, families (the strongest foundation of the community) are broken daily by this industrialized prison system. This is a real impediment to the success of the black community.
