A Follow-Up To “Incarceration, Racism, and the Preservation of White Supremacy”

“- Ten times as many Americans were imprisoned in the 1990s alone as were killed during the entire Vietnam War.

– By 2006, 1 in 9 black men were in prison.

– The number of police in the New York City public schools is the tenth-largest police force in the country, larger than the entire city police forces of Washington, D.C., Detroit, Boston, or Las Vegas.

– The drug addiction rate has been stable over the entire 20th century—consistently, roughly 1.3 percent of all Americans are addicted to drugs, regardless of changes in drug enforcement.

– According to 2000 federal data, white students were 1/3 more likely to have *sold* illegal drugs than blacks. White students *used* cocaine at 7 times the rate of black students, they used crack at 8 times the rate of black students, and they used heroin at 7 times the rate of black students. (I’ll leave you to compare those rates to drug arrest and incarceration rates by race.)”

She also reveals to us the fact that, contrary to popular opinion, “homicide rates were higher in the 20s and 30s than in the 60s.” Significantly for our purposes, it was also in the 60s that the era of mass incarceration began.