America's Prisons Reflect Racial Injustice

America Has More of Its Population in Prison Than Any Other Country on Earth

Prisons are big in the United States.  We have a higher percentage of our population in prison than any other nation. America, with less than 5 percent of the world population, has a quarter of the world's prisoners. Our jails and prisons have become the 51st state, with a greater combined population than Alaska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Although blacks account for only 12 percent of the U.S. population, 44 percent of all prisoners in the United States are black. The proportion of blacks in prison populations exceeds the proportion among state residents in every single state. In twenty states, the percent of blacks incarcerated is at least five times greater than their share of resident population.

"The United States is filling its expanding number of cellblocks with an ever-rising sea of black people monitored by predominantly white overseers," said noted author Paul Street in Dissent Magazine. "Echoes of slavery haunt the new incarceration state."

African-Americans are arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for drug offenses at far higher rates than whites. This racial disparity bears little relationship to racial differences in drug offending. For example, although the proportion of all drug users who are black is generally in the range of 13 to 15 percent, blacks constitute 36 percent of arrests for drug possession. Blacks constitute 63 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons. In at least fifteen states, black men were sent to prison on drug charges at rates ranging from twenty to fifty-seven times those of white men.

"With racial minorities vastly over-represented in federal and state prisons and local jails, " observed author Norman Soloman, "such numbers reflect profound institutional biases that converge at the intersection of racism and unequal justice based on economic class."