Study Says More Blacks In Jail Today Than Were In Slavery In 1850
They always said that jail was a form of new age slavery for African Americans and a study today proves that theory.
Ohio State University law professor and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander recently released the book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” which reportedly claims that there are more African Americans incarcerated, on probation or parole than there were slaves before the start of the Civil War.
According to Elev8.com Alexander discussed the troubling statistic in front of an audience at the Pasadena Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” she said. Alexander also argues that prisons have become the latest form of economic and social disenfranchisement for young people of color. To put it in perspective, the U.S. Bureau of Justice estimates that 846,000 black men alone were incarcerated in 2008 (according to NewsOne). While being only 13.2% of the general population, black men make up 40% of all prison inmates.
The reasoning behind the troubling number of African American males imprisoned has a great deal to do with one crime fighting measure that has been panned by critics of the justice system. “Most of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,” Alexander says.
You can pick up a copy of here book here.
not even surprise when dealing with “guilty” ppl they don’t even hide themselves. And let’s add the % of workers with low salaries that hardly make the food/clothe/shelter basic needs. Let’s talk about why weed it’s still ilegal? Why most of credits company are aload to exercise? Why they’ve lying to whites making them think that it only happens to black ppl, when it’s damm sure afecting the lower class in their globality.
The larger point of this post is well-taken, but the reporting and statistical analysis supporting the story is sloppy, vague or non-existent. While the fact that today’s black incarcerated population is larger than the 1850 slavery population (and alarmingly out of proportion to our share of the U.S. Population) in sheer numbers is a shocking comparison, it doesn’t really say much. Today’s total black population is far larger than the total black population in 1850. So a more accurate and illustrative comparison would be the PERCENTAGE of the black population who were slaves in 1850 versus the PERCENTAGE of the black population incarcerated today.
According to the 1850 Census, there were 3.6 million African Americans (including 3.2 million slaves) in the U.S. Population. In 2010, the Census reported nearly 39 million African Americans (not counting those of mixed races), more than ten times the black population in 1850. Based on those figures, it is highly doubtful that today’s black incarceration rates are anywhere near the proportion of blacks in slavery in 1850.