To describe convicted criminals, many of whom committed serious and at times horrible crimes, as people without freedom is an insult to their victims.
Yes some of them are in jail for victimless crimes but many of them are not and to conflate the two is a profound misjudgment.
Here’s an update to the figures I posted in 2012.
Actually, the first figure isn’t really an update because the Bureau of Justice Statistics doesn’t seem to publish complete incarceration rates by age, race/ethnicity, and sex anymore. These are just state and federal prisoners sentenced to a year or more — jail isn’t included. (This is from the report called Prisoners in 2013, because the “Correctional Populations in…” series doesn’t include the race/ethnic breakdown anymore.)
The highest bar in the 2010 figure was 9,892 per 100,000 for Black men in their early 30s, much higher than these — as you can see in the second figure, jail adds almost half again to the number of people in prison. So this isn’t a good measure of the total impact of incarceration, but it does show the racial/ethnic inequality: the Black bars are between 3.8-times higher than the White bars (age 65+) and 9.5-times…
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