U.S. Imprisons More Blacks Than Apartheid South Africa

The United States imprisons a higher proportion of blacks than South Africa did during the height of apartheid, according to Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times article, “When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5.” He is referring to an Aspen Institute report that highlights the fact that “racial disproportionalities exist in every facet of the criminal justice system.” Kristof asserts that Americans must “grapple with race because the evidence is overwhelming that racial bias remains deeply embedded in American life.”

According to the ACLU, the United States consists of only 5 percent of the world’s population, yet it has 25 percent of the world’s prison population, making it “the world’s largest jailer.” It goes on to say that our prison population has risen 700 percent since 1970, and that currently one in 99 adults are living behind bars in the U.S. — the highest rate of imprisonment in American history.

The report goes on to say, “One in 21 adults are under some form of correctional control, counting prison, jail, parole, and probation populations. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all of those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.”

The prison industry is growing and becoming a lucrative investment for certain stakeholders. In fact, according to the ACLU, incarceration and related costs are the second fastest growing category of state budgets — 90 percent of this spending goes to prisons. It goes on to say that incarceration and related costs have quadrupled over the past 20 years, and now account for one out of every 15 state discretionary fund dollars.

According to Mint Press News, inmate labor is cheap labor, and last year federal prison inmates, whose wages were under $2 per hour, “stitched more than $100 million worth of military uniforms.” It says that inmate labor is managed by Unicor, a government agency. The report goes on to say that companies like McDonald’s, Walmart, AT&T, and IBM, just to name a few, support the use of these workers. It is calling inmate labor slave labor.

The Huffington Post says, “In recent years, figures show prison labor has boomed in the face of rising unemployment.”

It says that Professors Steve Fraser and Joshua Freeman attributed the rise to the privatization of prisons, “which has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.”

The professors go on to say, “Nearly a million of prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.”

Thanks to the media, there is a trend involving prison culture. In an Inquisitr report last July, a Michigan sheriff decided to change the color of the inmate uniforms to resemble those on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black.

Sheriff William Federspiel of Saginaw County said that he made the decision because “some people think it’s cool to look like an inmate of the Saginaw County Jail… wearing all orange jumpsuits out at the mall or in public.”

The Aspen Institute says that “decontextualized media coverage” has only intensified “a kind of representational apartheid in the public mind.” It says that the “overinvolvement of young men of color in gangs and street crime” that is portrayed in the media decontextualized causes white America to “discount black and brown humanity” to the point that they “cannot imagine their full inclusion in every dimension of mainstream society.”

What do you think? Is there hope of reversing the trend that reflects a higher proportion of blacks in prison in the U.S. than at the height of South Africa’s apartheid?

[Image via The American Prospect]