*Attorney Antonio Moore talks about the astronomical Black Male incarceration rate, and he contrast it to the female incarceration rate globally.

Moore shows while focusing on America’s 12 million black working age males that more Black Men Incarcerated in America, then the number of women incarcerated on the entire planet.

Incarcerated black America: Past, present and future

Before the implementation of crack cocaine sentencing and the privatization of prisons in the mid 1980s, black male prison rates hovered around the range of 1,000 per 100,000. Since then, the rate has risen to numbers never seen in modern history. Fueled by changes in drug sentencing and inclusion of minor crimes, such as child support violations and driving with a suspended license, within the umbrella of imprisonable offenses the number of black males incarcerated skyrocketed.

… the ratio for young black male imprisonment is around 10 percent, or about 10,000 prisoners per 100,000… During South African apartheid, one of the most horrific instances of racism the world has seen, the prison rate for black male South Africans, under immensely unfair laws, was 851 per 100,000. In America today, young black men face a rate of imprisonment effectively ten times that number. Can Black Boys Cry — Shadow of Mass Incarceration

The consequences these high prison rates have had on the social development of the black family are immeasurable. Initially, you are drawn to see the irony of a group whose ancestors endured slavery and Jim Crow being funneled back into incarceration at such high rates. But the less obvious result is a massive decrease in working age black men that are actually participating in the workforce. Black America can ill afford to have a third of their working age men go to jail at some point in their life. This absence has resulted in an epidemic of broken homes and far too many black children being raised without a father. Policy makers talk as if sentencing changes will fix what was taken economically when the black community lost so many of its working age black men to the drug war. It will not; focused economic policy is needed to repair the black community. In addition, a demand to evaluate the impact of private prisons on incarceration rates must be made.

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