Written by Morgan Mullings
How much do we know about the United States process of incarceration? Statistics are gathered year after year on the incarceration of criminals that seemingly deserve their sentence, but when it comes time to examine these statistics, the findings are surprisingly not well known among teenagers. Whether this affects their lives currently or not, they should be worried about the U.S. prison system and the kind of mentality it projects.
African Americans make up about 14% of the U.S. population.
This means that for every 3 black people in the U.S., there are about 21 white people. Imagine a bright red rose in a field of daisies; pretty easy to spot, right?
For every 10 white people incarcerated, there are about 55 black people incarcerated. This is not representative of the population of the U.S. and is becoming a growing concern. This supports the racist idea that black people are more capable of committing crimes than white people are. This racism is the foundation for stereotypes that quite literally say “we are attaching certain abilities and levels of good nature and intelligence to specific races,” which is not backed by facts or science, but by hatred and ignorance.
45% of incarcerated people are black. 14% versus 45%. You have to throw a lot of black people in prison to make 14% into 45%.
Prisons are overwhelmingly male, but about 23% of those males are black, and the majority of young incarcerated males between the ages of 25-29 are black. So what does this mean for our young black men coming out of high school? Is one mistake going to send them to jail while their white counterparts can go free on the same charge? They will definitely have a better chance.
What could be scarier than the school to prison pipeline? The length of the sentence. This injustice is most present in the “war on drugs,” where African Americans make up only 14% of drug users. However, they make up about 37% of those arrested on drug offenses. Once arrested, according to americanprogress.org, “the U.S. Sentencing Commission stated that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10 percent longer than white offenders for the same crimes. The Sentencing Project reports that African Americans are 21 percent more likely to receive mandatory-minimum sentences than white defendants and are 20 percent more like to be sentenced to prison.”
Here’s an illustration to make this a bit clearer: Let’s say there are a black man and a white man arrested at the same time on the same day, both for drug dealing (first of all, even if the black man and the white man are in business with each other, statistics show the black man will most likely be arrested first). If they were both dealing about 1500 kilograms of marijuana, the white man could be sentenced to 10 years in prison, but could get out early but would be considered for good behavior. The black man would more likely be sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 10 years before they even consider release.
There are less black people, but they’re more likely to be arrested and stay in prison for a longer time. What does that say about the mentality of U.S. law enforcement and the criminal justice system? It says that racism has taken precedence over America’s most famous value: liberty and justice for all.
*Statistics gathered from prisonpolicy.org, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and americanprogress.org.
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