Study finds rate of jail time high for young blacks

[icymist]

Saturday, May 22, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.

Study finds rate of jail time high for young blacks

By Lornet Turnbull
Seattle Times staff reporter

By the time they'd reached their 30th birthdays, one in five black American men who are now between 35 and 39 years old had spent time in a state or federal prison, a new study by a University of Washington researcher shows.

And if on top of that they had also dropped out of high school, the likelihood of incarceration increased to a rate of more than 1 in 2.

"Imprisonment is now a common life event for an entire demographic group," Becky Pettit, one of the report's authors and a UW assistant professor of sociology, said in a statement.

The report, which Pettit co-wrote with Princeton University sociology professor Bruce Western, was published this week in the American Sociological Review.

The study focused on two groups of men — those born between 1965 and 1969 and those born between 1945 and 1949. It used Bureau of Justice Statistics data on inmates in all federal and state prisons but does not include information about time spent in local jails....

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[DS1]

1. Damn, I need to get in on this gov't study industry

Talk about high rate returns on effort!

:eyes:

[jobycom]

2. Cause they're stealing all those cokes and pound cakes

Not because black man are unemployed at twice the rate of white men, or because our educational system has failed them before they are old enough to form their sense of right and wrong.

quote--

"Over the last 30 years, the risk of incarceration has grown for both blacks and whites, but has grown the fastest among men who have a high-school diploma or less." The dropout rate among black males is about 14 percent; the rate among white males is about half that.

end quote--

But Bill Cosby blames it on pound cake and coke and $500 shoes and bad English.

[justjones]

7. It's b/c of ebonics! If they can only learn to speak standard English!

/sarcasm off

:eyes:

[bemildred]

3. Land of the Free?

Incarceration rates in George W. Bush's America
and Stalin's USSR:

USSR (1950): 1423 per 100,000
USA (2002): 2298 per 100,000

Incarceration rate for Black men in contemporary
America and in South Africa before ANC rule:

South Africa (1993): 851 per 100,000
USA (2002): 7150 per 100,000

[Barkley]

6. Great Stats! I wonder how much those incarceration costs us?

There never enough extra money for schools, education etc. but we've got
$121 billion for Iraq.

I tutor kids in a predominately black hgih school that doesn't have an intercom system.

But I bet Abu Ghraid prison and every prison in the State of California has an intercom system.

I bet the costs of incarceration exceeds the benefits.

The rationale seems to be that these black bafoons are to stupid to improve so why waste tax dollars on educating them?

[bemildred]

9. Yeah, all those prisons could be schools.

All those guards could be teachers.
I makes me want to puke.

The estimates I've seen are around $25-30K per year per inmate.
I don't know of ANY state that spends more than $10K per year
per child, but I don't keep up with it.

[bemildred]

10. FWIW, those stats seem to be in the nature of

persons incarcerated at some time in their lives,
not those currently incarcerated, for current inmates
I've been shown numbers about a third of these.

They are from the Jan/Feb issue of the Utne reader.

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. That's because we jail the brown ones in the U.S. too.

These studies are getting so repetitous that I wonder who is left in America that doesn't know we practice discrimnation in the Criminal Justice system?

[Alerter_]

5. privatized slavery

and look what they do to prisoners

[Soloflecks]

8. AIDS!

How many of these men come out of the criminal justice system with AIDS? Not to mention it is increasily difficult to find any kind of employment with criminal arrests on your "resume". No such thing as a second chance today. People who have been "good citizens" for 20, 30 years are still being persecuted for misdeeds in their reckless youth. So, now they get them "inducted" in the system earlier and earlier so they never have a chance at all and then maybe come out with a major illness to top it all off.