African American Prisoners Research Paper

Andersonville Prison epitomized the ultimate crime against humanity. The atrocities that transpired in this confederate prison sparked reaction and outrage at the conclusion of the Civil War.

Comparing the racial composition of American society to the racial composition of death row inmates, the data shows blacks, Hispanics, and others make up nearly half of the death row inmates. Despite making up the minority of the population. Whites make up the majority of death row inmates and correspondingly make up the majority of the population.

“We ain’t thugs for the sake of just bein’ thugs. Nobody do that where we grew at N___, duh! The poverty line we not above. So I come in the mask and gloves ‘cause we ain’t feelin’ the love. We ain’t doin’ crime for the sake of doin’ crimes. We movin’ dimes ‘cause we ain’t doin’ fine. One out of three of us is locked up doin’ time. You know what this could do to a N___ mind? My mind on my money, money on my mind. If you owe me ten dollars you ain’t givin’ me nine! Ya’ll ain’t give me 40 acres and a mule. So I got my glock 40 now I’m cool.” –Jay-Z

We live in a Nation that has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world, standing at about 700 for every 100,000 people are incarcerated. To put that into perspective that's about 1.6 to 2 million people of the 315 million people in the U.S. With about 40% of them being African American. 40% may not sound very high but, the surprising fact around all of these statistics, is only 13% of the entire population is African American. You may ask yourself how is this possible? Well let’s talk about that. The three major factors that contribute to high black incarceration rates are due to broken black communities/growth roots, the recidivism cycle and prejudice among police forces.

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones” –Nelson Mandela. Life in prison is unimaginable to most of the population of this world. Prison is a place of great diversity. An article from crimemuseum.com states the ratio of races in prison populations from 2007: “Statistics from 2007 indicate that 93% of the prison population is made up of males, and 7% of inmates were female. Comparisons with data from 1995 and 2000 indicate that those numbers remain nearly constant from year to year. Out of those locked up, 33% were White, 39% were Black, and about 20% were Hispanic” (“Prison”, 2017, p. 1). In prison, there is

African Americans obtain 37% of the United States prisoner population. “The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population… But 25% of the world’s Prisoners” (Duvernay, 2016). All prisoners combined in the world is nine million. Calculating with 25% equals to 2.25 million prisoners in the United States. The African American population of prisoners is over 600,000. That is 16% of the African American population in the United States.

The United States has the biggest prison and jail population in the world not only by population, but also by sheer numbers. Many of these offenders are behind bars for nonviolent drug crimes and statistically more of those non-violent offenders are African American. African Americans are 13% of the United States Population but make up over 40% of the current jail and prison population. A black man is five times more likely to be convicted of a crime than a white man in the United States. How far have we really come sinse the Jim Crow laws? During the Jim Crow Era African-Americans in some states were treated as second-class citizens in every aspect of life from how they interact with White Americans to not having the right to vote. Many

African American male incarceration rate may have a large impact on a city’s or county’s sex ratio for African-Americans in the reproductive age range (ages 15-49), but may not be noticeable at the neighborhood or state level, and may have no association with sex ratios of other racial/ethnic or age groups. A low sex ratio, indicating a shortage of men, reflects an increased demographic opportunity for the men remaining in the community to accrue more heterosexual partners. For people on probation or parole, opportunities for sexual partnerships with low-risk partners may be limited by the associative nature of sexual partnerships and by the perception among potential partners that ex-offenders are members of a high-risk

The kind of racism going on in the United States right now makes it nearly impossible to call it out because of the smoke screen created. Racism entrenched in the law can continue unabated because the public and the world will not have a reason to speak against the act of injustice. After all, one committed a crime and was justly punished for it. As this goes on, African American men continue to become a frustrated lot. The police unleash unnecessary brutality on them, invade their privacy in the name of applying the law and downright trample on their constitutional rights. Black children grow up with the mentality that they are not good enough like their white counterparts. In effect, they drop out of school and end up doing odd jobs or engage

The trend of African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 has seen a dramatic increase of incarceration. Attention has been focusing on areas of housing, education, and healthcare but the most prominent problem for African American males is the increase in the incarceration rate. African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 incarceration rate has been thought, by many, to be caused by economic factors such as under employment or unemployment, poor housing, lack of education, and lack of healthcare. Yet, others believe it is due to the imbalance of minorities within the criminal justice system, such as judges, lawyers, and lawmakers.

Once a prisoner is released they do have a hard time on the outside, because the world on the outside might have changed, well depending how long they were in prison. Many offenders find it hard to adjust to the outside world because of new technology, sometimes jobs require someone to know how to use a tablet or computer, but if they have been locked up they wouldn’t know how to use it. African Americans who are uneducated and poor are unable to follow gender roles, economic activity, and have good public behavior (Alexander, 213).

African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated; that is 60% of 30% of the African American population. African Americas are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. “Between 6.6% and 7.5% of all black males ages 25 to 39 were imprisoned in 2011, which were the highest imprisonment rates among the measured sex, race, Hispanic origin, and age groups." (Carson, E. Ann, and Sabol, William J. 2011.) Stated on Americanprogram.org “ The Sentencing Project reports that African Americans are 21 percent more likely to receive mandatory-minimum sentences than white defendants and are 20 percent more likely to be sentenced to prison.” Hispanics and African Americans make up 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population. (Henderson 2000). Slightly 15% of the inmate population is made up of 283,000 Hispanic prisoners.

The first minorities that are often discriminated against are African Americans, more specifically, African American males. As of 2009, Johnson (2014) states that 39.4 percent of blacks represented the majority of the prisons (as cited in Bowman, 2014b, p. 324). According to Hartney and Vuong (2009), African Americans are more likely to get less favorable results than whites when it comes to the death penalty, prison sentencings, recidivism, etc. They’ve also stated that blacks are more likely to be sentenced to prison, while whites are sentenced to probation. Blacks are treated quite differently than the white inmates. Some studies have found that African Americans expressed great concern over the justice system, and have distributed their fear by becoming angry and hostile when they become incarnated, thus leading to more violent conflicts. Not only that, blacks are more prone to be viewed as intimidating by white prison employees, which is why most african americans are kept under surveillance besides the white and hispanic prisoners (Hawkins and Ross, n.d.). Prisons have also showcased different ways that African Americans are discriminated. A few examples are that white inmates were given better work tasks, while blacks were left with the custodian jobs. The prison system has also denied blacks of being able to transfer over to better housing and better tasks, which has led African Americans to complain about these discriminating acts (Hawkins and Ross, n.d.).

"We ain’t thugs for the sake of just bein’ thugs. Nobody do that where we grew at N___, duh! The poverty line we not above. So I come in the mask and gloves ‘cause we ain’t feelin’ the love. We ain’t doin’ crime for the sake of doin’ crimes. We movin’ dimes ‘cause we ain’t doin’ fine. One out of three of us is locked up doin’ time. You know what this could do to a N___ mind? My mind on my money, money on my mind. If you owe me ten dollars you ain’t givin’ me nine! Ya’ll ain’t give me 40 acres and a mule. So I got my glock 40 now I’m cool." Jay-Z

As one can see, mass incarceration of African Americans is clearly an injustice that needs to be acknowledged and resolved. In my Social and Economic Justice course, several theorists were discussed about what they considered justice and their methods to reach it. In the following paragraphs, I examine Rawls’, Nozick’s, and Mill’s theories in context with the mass incarceration of African American and explain why their proposed solutions would not be applicable to this injustice. Rawls’ theory consists of imagining oneself in what he calls the Original Position, in which we are all self-interested rational people that stand behind the “Veil of Ignorance. By this, it means that people are motivated to select, in an informed and enlightened way whatever seems most beneficial for themselves. However, due to the Veil of Ignorance we do not know certain things such as our race, age, sex, social class, or physical/mental disabilities; we just are aware of the different scenarios that humans could possible face and the facts of humanity. Rawls believes that by having self-interested rational individuals, masked by the Veil of Ignorance, it would create a fair procedure in which fair principles would be chosen in order to govern the world. With this in mind, Rawls argues that these individuals would choose two principles, Principle of Equal Liberty and Difference Principle, to structure society in the real world. The Principle of Equal Liberty states that each person has an equal