The U.S. is King of the global prison hill, the result of a ferocious policy of mass Black incarceration. A new study by researchers at the Pew organization shows the U.S. is number one in numbers of prisoners per capita and sheer size of the national inmate population - many more inmates than are incarcerated in 1.2 billion population China. Seven times more Americans are locked up than during the early 1970s, when the prison explosion began, with non-whites now representing large majorities of prisoners. Mass Black incarceration is a deliberate policy of every state in the nation - a furious backlash against Black gains during the Sixties that continues unabated, disconnected from actual crime rates. Prison "reform" is a worthy goal, but the ongoing crime against African Americans as a people must be tackled head-on, by confronting the true nature of the beast.
Black Prison Gulag and the Police State
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
"America's prison model is directly derived from slavery - the virtual imprisonment of an entire people."
The United States has passed an historic and symbolic watershed in its unrelenting, two generations-long quest to incarcerate as many Blacks as humanly possible. As of January 1, more than one of every 100 adults is behind bars, about half of them Black. That's not counting Afro-Latinos and other Hispanics. The U.S. is the unchallenged leader in mass incarceration, with the largest Gulag on the planet, based on raw numbers of inmates - 2,319,258 in federal and state prisons and local jails - and per capita incarceration: 750 inmates for every 100,000 people. Russia, which led the world back in Soviet times, is number two, with 628 inmates per 100,000. The Black and brown U.S. prisoner population, alone, roughly equals that of China's - a nation with four times the population of the U.S.
Russia's imprisonment practices grew out of the Tsarist Siberian and later, Stalinist model. America's model is directly derived from slavery - the virtual imprisonment of an entire people. From the post-Emancipation "Black Codes" through the 1960s, Blacks have always been locked up in vastly disproportionate numbers. Still, white inmates were in the majority until at least 1964. Then, beginning in the early 70s, the prison population exploded, multiplying seven times. By 1996, African Americans comprised 53 percent of all persons admitted to state and federal prisons. One out of nine Black males between the ages of 20 and 34 now resides behind bars, compared to just one of every 30 whites.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=554&Itemid=1
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