African Americans In The Correctional System

Improved Essays
In a corrections system that is comprised of 2.3 million inmates, an estimated 1 million of those individuals are African American. In 2008, 58% of all inmates were comprised of Hispanics and African Americans. This rate is alarming considering only one quarter of the U.S population is comprised of Hispanics and African Americans (Western, B., & Pettit, B., 2010). It is expected that two- thirds of young African American boys that dropout of school will serve time in the correctional system. Young African American men who are raised in poverty areas are likely to spend time, during their life span, in prison or jail (Western, B., & Pettit, B., 2010). Blalock concluded that racial threat played a part in three forms: symbolic, economic and political

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Mass incarceration among the African American community is a problem, and this article provides the necessary information needed to convince the audience of the issues in our criminal justice system. Alexander uses quite a few appeals of logic in her article to strengthen her argument. The evidence throughout this essay ranges from court cases to published studies and statistical data. A very large statistic that would boggle anyone’s mind is; the United States only has 312 million people, yet we make up 25% of the world’s prison population.…

    • 465 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The New Jim Crow Summary

    • 1056 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The New Jim Crow brings a new constructive agenda to understand the sources of mass incarceration among black men in America. The book goes down a timeline that explains the birth and the end of slavery that ended in the civil war, then eventually led to jim crow laws which kept blacks in a lower caste system, which inhibited the rights and privileges that non- blacks had access to. Once the jim crow era ended, the storm wasn’t over and a new caste system erupted. A large dramatic of black male incarceration rates increase because the war on drug’s started. The book explains additional legal negative impacts that push forward to keep a constant state on the incarceration rates of black men such as police discretion, racism/colorism, legalized…

    • 1056 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world; 2.3 million inmates which equals a rate of 730 inmates to every 100,000 citizens. As Marc Mauer explains our correctional system began with the premise of rehabilitation but has now evolved into a retributive system. Race to Incarcerate A graphic retelling was the collaborative effort of Sabrina Jones and Marc Mauer. The purpose of this book is to explain why the mass incarceration rate has grown to the extraordinarily high level it has. Bringing into focus the very countless social and political policies that have failed us and if this incarceration rate continues: “1 out of 3 African American and one in 6 Latino males should expect to do time”(xii).…

    • 1166 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many people would not think that a racial caste system exists in the United States, especially after Barack Obama was elected as a president. However, having a few successful African Americans doesn’t necessarily mean racism is abolished. During the last thirty years, United States’ incarceration rates have soared while other countries’ incarceration rates remained the same or decreased. Not only that, the incarcerated population in the United States is racially disproportionate; about 90% of the prisoners are African Americans or Hispanics in most of the states. Although the studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at similar rates, African American men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at twenty to fifty…

    • 950 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Louisiana Prison Reform

    • 1049 Words
    • 5 Pages

    In 2007, 65% of white males were free while a 36% were imprisoned. In a disheartening comparison, only 12% of free black males made up the U.S population while more than 39% of black males were incarcerated (). Back in 1954, the number of imprisoned African Americans hovered somewhere new only 98,000 and by 2002 the number increased sharply to over 884,500. High crime rates among the black community have been linked to poverty, oppression and high pressure from local law authorities. Lawrence Bobo, author of Racialized Mass Incarceration, talks about the typical problems that stem from within black communities, “black involvement with criminal behavior is primarily traceable to differential black exposure to struc-tural conditions of extreme poverty, extreme racial segregation, changed law enforcement priorities, and the modern legacy of racial oppression”(Bobo).…

    • 1049 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    If these same characteristics were applied to a youth with minority background there would be a fifty- four percent chance of a recommendation for formal processing (Bishop and Frazier). Throughout the entirety of Bishop and Frazier’s research they found multiple indications of racial dissimilarities within the processing of juveniles. A white youth has a twelve percent chance of being held within a secure detention facility compared to the sixteen percent of their colored counterparts (Bishop and Frazier). When looking at the inconsistencies between the arrest rates of white and black youths,…

    • 1544 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Institutional Disparities Data Report On the off chance that we consider back the historical backdrop of the United States, we appear to have made some amazing progress in the battle against racial disparity; we even have our first African American president in office. No doubt we are near accomplishing the equity we have been exercising as a country, if we have not as of now accomplished it. In any case, despite what advancements we have made, the racial disparity is still a critical issue in today 's public, and it is clear when we investigate our criminal equity framework. The United States detains a larger number of individuals than any other nation on the planet, however that is just the start of our issue.…

    • 1297 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    He obtained research from Justice Policy Institute and stated that “Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American youths are far more likely to be transferred to adult courts, convicted in those courts, and incarcerated in youth or adult prison facilities than white youths.” This presents the issue that not only are minority juveniles being incarcerated more than white juveniles, but also being sentence far more as…

    • 902 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The criminal justice system in the United States has increasingly targeted people of color, more specifically African Americans, for crimes that they may have not committed. A huge number of incarcerated African Americans have been wrongfully convicted within the past 20 years. Through the creation of the national police force in 1893, African Americans have had a target on their back. Ever since the establishment of Jim Crows Laws in the 1890s through “separate but equal,” racism has been prominent in society. Through systematic racism, many Americans assume that Africans Americans are more likely to be engaging in criminal activity.…

    • 1996 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    One of every three black males born today will go to prison in their lifetime. According to Alfred Blumstein, “80 percent of racial disparity is explained by the greater involvement in crime”(51). According to Michael Tunry, “Only 61 percent of the black incarceration…

    • 1575 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    This shows that the juvenile justice system has no remorse or hope for African American youth. Even though there has been a drop in arrest nation wide, black youths are still twice as likely to be arrested than white youths and mainly for nonviolent crimes. Most corrupt youth situations begin at home or school due to schools not know how to address misbehavior. Black students make up 16% of all public school students and 31% of all arrests.…

    • 2175 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Introduction The school-to prison pipeline is an epidemic slowly crippling minority youth all over the country. This unspoken system teaches these children that the only path for them is jail. Jail has become the narrative of the black life in America: Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.…

    • 1570 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    African Americans have always been at the forefront of inequality in America; both in labor and imprisonment. Western states that, “The prison boom has driven a wedge into the African American community, where those without college education are not travelling a path of unique disadvantage that increasingly separates them from college-educated blacks”. Unfortunately, America’s change in penal system unintentionally put a target on those of African descent due to the fact that many young black men and African American communities are poor and deprived of jobs and…

    • 1296 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A number of the juveniles who enter adolescent justice with outrage issues, learning inabilities, and scholarly difficulties get practically no help for those issues, and thus fall behind in school. “Way too many kids enter juvenile-justice systems, they don’t do particularly well from an education standpoint while they’re there, and way too few kids make successful transitions out” (McGuire, 2014). Racial disparities has also been a challenge for the juvenile justice system. An unbalanced number of the understudies are male and individuals from minority groups. In 2010, 66% of the youngsters in authority in the United States were adolescents of color: 41 percent African-American and 22 percent Hispanic.…

    • 774 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Henslin displays a table that estimates about forty-seven percent of African Americans are inmates in the U.S. state prisons (151). African Americans are also the leading race-ethnicity in jail. These Statements were stated to say this; mass incarceration is keeping the African American race from advancing in society. Approximately forty percent of the inmates have less than a high school education (151). With half of the African American population incarcerated that eliminates the chances of a substantial income and power.…

    • 1449 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays