- More African American adults are under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
- In many large urban areas in the United States, the majority of working-age African American men have criminal records.
- In less than 30 years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, giving the US the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
- Drug convictions alone accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal system, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000.
- In some states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.
Published by
- Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law