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Racial and ethnic minorities have always been disproportionately represented in American prisons. As far back as 1833, Gustav de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting to study the newly invented penitentiary system for the French government, observed that “in those states in which there exist one negro to thirty whites the prisons contain one negro to four white persons.” De Beaumont and de Tocqueville’s observations, as suggested by the proportions, pertained only to free blacks in Northern and border states. Most African Americans at the time were slaves and were seldom placed in prison. Masters punished the transgressions of their property as they saw fit.