Punishment and Inequality in America
by Bruce Western
In the US the impact of mass incarceration on black communities is in effect to roll back many of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1960s on. The basic brute fact of incarceration in the new era of mass imprisonment is that African-Americans are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than whites… The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2004 over 12 per cent of black men aged 25-29 were behind bars.
