18 things you should know about mass incarceration

[ismnotwasm]

National outrage over the failure of grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island to indict police officers in the killings of unarmed black men has understandably focused on policing practices in African-American communities.

But racially biased policing is just one piece of a broader system that stigmatizes and targets black men for arrest and incarceration at an early age, when many are pushed out of school and into juvenile lock-ups for trivial offenses.

It’s a system that has forged the world’s largest prison system, one that author and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander has labeled the “new Jim Crow.”

And it’s a system that has resulted in a dramatic rise in the U.S. incarceration rate – the number of prisoners per-capita – that the National Academy of Sciences has concluded is unprecedented in world history.

http://www.splcenter.org/18-things-you-should-know-about-mass-incarceration

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. The mass incarceration of African-Americans (and the poor) is horrendous; but ...

did anyone see what was/is being done here (not by you, ismnotwasm ... hey, I just paid attention to you screen name ... I like it's truth) ...

Buried in the midst of the slides (#6 and 8 and then again at #16) the REAL purpose of this slide show is revealed ... "Be upset about the mass incarceration because ... DRUGS!" ... not because the system is grossly over-represented, Black.

Were that, not, the case, why devote 3 (out of 18) slides to communicate what the final slide (#18) communicates ... the disparity between black and white.

BTW, I have read, and highly recommend, Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness ; but it is not what many try to make it out to be ... a pointed condemnation on the "War on Drugs", which was discussed (along with other policy phenomena like "Zero Tolerance" and school discipline policies) in a single chapter of a 6 chapter book.

Sorry ... Just got to get that out there!

[Mnemosyne]

2. K&R for more visibility. nt