Today is a nice and rainy Saturday. The skies are dark and everyone over in my apartment complex is holed up inside of their rooms, waiting for the downpour to cease and for the sun to come back again.
We are like prisoners, trapped inside because nature has found today to be a good day to frown down upon us. So I, being a prisoner of the weather, will now blog a bit about the real prisoners in the United States, those stuck behind walls of concrete.
Many people in America are aware of the skewed statistics of people behind bars, namely how minority populations somehow make up a majority of prison populations. Lets take a look at a handy graph to show us incarceration rates by race:
We are like prisoners, trapped inside because nature has found today to be a good day to frown down upon us. So I, being a prisoner of the weather, will now blog a bit about the real prisoners in the United States, those stuck behind walls of concrete.
Many people in America are aware of the skewed statistics of people behind bars, namely how minority populations somehow make up a majority of prison populations. Lets take a look at a handy graph to show us incarceration rates by race:
Even a cursory knowledge of statistics will show us that there is definitely something wrong with this picture. There are nearly six times as many Caucasian Americans as there are African Americans, and yet there are more African Americans in prison. Strange indeed.
Does this imply that African Americans are somehow more violent then Caucasian or Hispanic Americans? That for some inexplicable reason they commit more crimes? I’d like to think that we abandoned that kind of thinking, at least in this state, more then 100 years ago. Socioeconomic standing could be part of the cause of this; poverty tends to encourage crime, and African Americans make 22-26% less then their white counterparts, on average. Follow this link to a wonderful article that can better explain how this situation could have happened, and how bad the gap between the different races of America really is, with a specific focus on blacks vs. whites.
Take a look at my previous post about the Jena Six. So far, no white children have been charged with any crime, although they have been on record for intimidating, beating, threatening, and coercing fellow students. This situation is unfortunate indeed. Even worse is that, over the years, there have been specific laws put into place in order to put more African Americans in jail for longer. Take the difference between carrying a gram of cocaine and a gram of “crack” cocaine. The two are essentially the same, except crack is “freebased”, smokable, and chemically held together by any number of this (often times other drugs). Getting caught with a gram of cocaine will net you perhaps a year in prison, while the same amount of “crack” cocaine will get you perhaps 20 years or more. Why? Because crack is cheaper and is used primarily by poor, black communities.
Does this imply that African Americans are somehow more violent then Caucasian or Hispanic Americans? That for some inexplicable reason they commit more crimes? I’d like to think that we abandoned that kind of thinking, at least in this state, more then 100 years ago. Socioeconomic standing could be part of the cause of this; poverty tends to encourage crime, and African Americans make 22-26% less then their white counterparts, on average. Follow this link to a wonderful article that can better explain how this situation could have happened, and how bad the gap between the different races of America really is, with a specific focus on blacks vs. whites.
Take a look at my previous post about the Jena Six. So far, no white children have been charged with any crime, although they have been on record for intimidating, beating, threatening, and coercing fellow students. This situation is unfortunate indeed. Even worse is that, over the years, there have been specific laws put into place in order to put more African Americans in jail for longer. Take the difference between carrying a gram of cocaine and a gram of “crack” cocaine. The two are essentially the same, except crack is “freebased”, smokable, and chemically held together by any number of this (often times other drugs). Getting caught with a gram of cocaine will net you perhaps a year in prison, while the same amount of “crack” cocaine will get you perhaps 20 years or more. Why? Because crack is cheaper and is used primarily by poor, black communities.
No comments:
Post a Comment