What White privilege?
Would love to see the number of for-profit prisons added to this graph.
Forgot the snark tag - I almost thought you meant it.
Fox News, “Surly the take home message from this is to lock up all Black students as soon as they drop out of High School!”
I’m waiting to see the ‘race doesn’t matter’ comments…
I’d love to see these numbers controlled for petty drug offenses.
I’m guessing the number of young black men imprisoned for murder, bank robbery, and the sort of stuff someone ought to be in prison for is flat (or better than flat) since 1979, but the petty drug stuff is both massively higher and racially discriminatory.
Exactly…This does make you desperate to know WHAT all that additional prison time is from.
A: “Well of course we need to lock up all those awful criminals with society going to hell in a handbasket these days.”
B: “Actually violent crime rates are considerably lower than they were in 1979.”
A: “Aha! It’s working!”
I wish there were a dollar figure associated with that increase. No wonder we no longer have any money for schools and college financial aid. All the money was spent on locking up black men in prison.
Working as intended.
I’d like to see a further break down of what charges are sending people to prison.
I am thinking drug charges account for much of the increase.
If you go to the article it has a graph for violent crime rate vs. prison rate over time. An approximation of your question. And hell yeah - violent crime on a huge decrease over time - prison rates huge increase.
Violent crime rate going down since 1990 - Prison rates going up since about 1973. I’d like to see them add a prison privatization graph along side these…
c. But…why the 20 year lag time for an effect…
Prison privatization is certainly a problem, but so to is the insane might of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association – and a lot of other public sector prison unions elsewhere in the US. Those guys get paid, and their entity grows, because of public sector prisons.
It is distressing that not only are the numbers for African-American prisoners disproportionately high, ALL the imprisonment percentages went up.
Can we stop locking up so many people, America?
it has to do with reduction of environmental lead.
Supposedly the most comprehensive recent book on this subject is “Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.”
According to this review:
Most of the comments here are typical BoingBoing blather: Unsupported assumptions that just reflect your own (often wrong) biases.
If you’d like to do something to make a positive change, you might consider fighting to increase educational and economic opportunities legally available to people of color.
But if you’d rather perpetuate these disparities, a quick and easy way to contribute to that cause is divisive rhetoric that pushes people apart on a color line.
Those data are useless without the dropout rates for those years compared as well.
