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And the Prison Industrial Complex Grows and Grows

09:29 H | Topics: Justice - Politics - Race

Late last month a report released by the Pew Center reveals what many have already known, that prisons are growing with people of color as the human raw materials for this industry.

The United States, land of the free, home of the brave, now incarcerates more people than any other country on the globe. More than one in every 100 U.S. residents is incarcerated.

The 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

Is there any doubt then what the U.S. thinks of its youth, especially it's youth of color?

One in every 15 Black men is incarcerated. When the study looked at Black men ages 20--34, the incarceration rate jumped 40 percent to one in every nine, compared to one in every 106 white men. The report also found "especially startling" incarceration rates among Black and white women, noting one in every 355 white women ages 35--39 is incarcerated, compared with one in every 100 Black women.

I know people will pull stats out their ass now, saying that blacks and other people of color just do more crimes, without a real in depth analysis of what is called a crime in the U.S. and how people of color are disproportionately targeted.

These stats must be looked at in the context of dropping violent crime rates across the country. As more and more cities are adopted a broken windows theory to crime, more and more people are being incarcerated for lesser crimes, ensuring that prisons keep raking in the dollars.

While these numbers are shocking, they are not necessarily surprising. A 2006 Census Bureau survey that studied social, racial and economic characteristics of people living in adult correctional facilities found that there are more Blacks in prison than in classrooms. "It's one of the great social and economic tragedies of our time," Marc Morial, president and CEO of the Urban League, told MSNBC. "It points to the signature failure in our education system and how we've been raising our children. We do, in the African-American community, need to instill a stronger value on education."

Why are we blaming families of color instead of looking at the institutional racism that sets up young people of color to fail?

Via / MSNBC and Diversity Inc.

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