Saturday, February 16, 2008

The USofA's Criminal "Just-us" system.

2008's Ten Worst Places to Be Black

By Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report via Alternet. Posted February 13, 2008.

Sorry Obama, Black America is not "90 percent of the way" to equality.

America's prison system, the world's largest, houses some 2.2 million people. Almost half its prisoners come from the one-eighth of this country, which is black. African-American communities have been hard hit by the social, political and economic repercussions of the growth of America's prison state. Its presence and its reach into black life is a useful index of the quality of life in black America itself.

In this year of symbolic optimism, when a black man is a leading contender in the presidential race, as well as a leading recipient of contributions from Wall Street, big insurance and military contractors, the need to measure and describe life as it is actually lived by millions of African-Americans has never been greater.
. . .

The Ten Worst States by Black/White Prisoner Ratio:

Iowa

Vermont

New Jersey

Connecticut

North Dakota

Wisconsin

South Dakota

Rhode Island

New Hampshire

The USofA's enormous prison system, racist? Why I never. This is a really interesting article that really gets to the heart of the problems in our nation's Criminal "Just-us" system. I thought it was fascinating to note that NOT ONE of the states with the worst black to white prisoner-ratios was in the deep south. Not one.

As a lifelong Midwesterner who honestly hasn't spent much time in the deep South, I'd always just kind of naturally assumed that issues like this would look even worse when viewed through the lens of the deep south. That NONE of the worst offending states are from that region really surprised, and kinda got to me. We are all responsible for what our government does in our name. This practice of locking up
black people many times more often than white has got to stop.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting, none the less. It is an odd fact that the states with the highest over all inmates are in order; Texas, Florida, California and Illinois? One needs to ask, are people just not breaking the law in those other states as much? Or are the laws being enforced in those states much more sever.

Downtown Dave said...

Thanks for the comment, Smiley. I think it has to be said that law enforcement in this country is utterly arbitrary. Minorities are targeted mostly because they are more likely to end up in jail, because they don't have the legal resources that richer, ostensibly white people have.