ABSTRACT
With an incarcerated population of over 2.3 million, the US has more people and a higher percentage of its population behind bars than any other country.1 If we add those on probation and parole, over seven million – more than 90 percent male – are under American penal supervision. In 1970, fewer than 200,000 Americans were incarcerated. Since then, crime rates have fluctuated and are now roughly where they were in 1973, yet our prison population has steadily grown. Much of the growth stems from tougher drug legislation passed during the last three decades; about one-third of incarcerations today are for drug offenses, mostly nonviolent.2 These policies affect more middle class white Americans than we may realize, yet the impact on them is tiny compared with that on minorities – especially black men – from poor urban neighborhoods and our inner cities.3 If present trends continue, one-third of African-American men will go to prison during their lives; of those who do not finish high school, almost 60 percent serve prison sentences by the age of 40.4 Many black urban children grow up thinking of prison as a normal part of adult male life and barely knowing incarcerated fathers, partly because the facilities to which most inmates are sent lie more than a hundred miles from their home communities. The prisons support the economies of those largely rural white locales, while the inner cities bearing the brunt of crime remain impoverished.
