40 Reasons Our Jails and Prisons Are Full of Black and Poor People

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By Bill Quigley / AlterNet
June 6, 2015

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) reports 2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one of every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and Black. Here are 40 reasons why.

One. It is not just about crime. Our jails and prisons have grown from holding about 500,000 people in 1980 to 2.2 million today. The fact is that crime rates have risen and fallen independently of our growing incarceration rates.

Two. Police discriminate. The first step in putting people in jail starts with interactions between police and people. From the very beginning Black and poor people are targeted by the police. Police departments have engaged in campaigns of stopping and frisking people who are walking, mostly poor people and people of color, without cause for decades. Recently New York City lost a federal civil rights challenge to their police stop and frisk practices by the Center for Constitutional Rights during which police stopped over 500,000 people annually without any indication that the people stopped had been involved in any crime at all. About 80 percent of those stops were of Black and Latinos who compromise 25 and 28 percent of NYC’s total population. Chicago police do the same thing stopping even more people also in a racially discriminatory way with 72 percent of the stops of Black people even though the city is 32 percent Black.

Three. Police traffic stops also racially target people in cars. Black drivers are 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers and Hispanic drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. Connecticut, in an April 2015 report, reported on 620,000 traffic stops which revealed widespread racial profiling, particularly during daylight hours when the race of driver was more visible.

read more: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/40-reasons-our-jails-and-prisons-are-full-black-and-poor-people

[msongs]

1. elected dems/repubs love for-profit prisons so there must be arrests and convictions to keep the $$

flowing

[napkinz]

3. ...

[Warpy]

2. I read a study that said police

consistently overestimated the height and weight of black men, especially. The odd thing was that black cops had the same bias. It means cops will see a potential threat where none exists.

People need to be aware of this shit. It's real and it's out there.

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4. "People need to be aware of this shit"

you'll never hear about it on FOX

[napkinz]

5. kick

[Rex]

6. I remember reading long ago, that crack cocaine was invented to keep black people

poor, in prison and in the ghetto, by people in authority. I laughed it off as a CS, but after all that has happened over the past 7 years...I no longer laugh nor think it is a CS.