Very little of this is my personal work.
Links are buried in spoilers to reduce clutter.
I wasn't really blown away by these graphs because I'm not really surprised by the results - I was familiar with the underlying stats. But what about what lies underneath them?
The young male dropout aspect is somewhat understandable, and likely has some ties to mental health issues, but why blacks?
Quote:
Incarceration & social inequality by Bruce Western & Becky Pettit
In 1980, around 10 percent of young African American men
who dropped out of high school were in prison. By 2008, this incarceration rate had climbed to 37 percent, an astonishing level of institutionalization given that the average incarceration rate in the
general population was 0.76 of 1 percent.
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Because blacks break the law more, right? Obviously.
Fact: Black youths arrested for drug possession are 48 times more likely to wind up in prison than white youths arrested for the same crime under the same circumstances.
Fact: Black and Latino men are three times more likely than white men to be stopped by the police and have their cars searched – even though white men are four times more likely to have weapons or drugs.
Fact: Students of colour are more than twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school even though they are not much more likely to break school rules than whites.
Brief timeline of American race relations:
* 1776-1865: slavery (sucked for black people)
* 1865-1877: reconstruction (still sucked for black people)
* 1877-1965: jim crow era (STILL sucked for black people)
* 1965-2011: civil rights era / obama (yay??)
We live in the age of a black president. In popular discourse, we are a postracial people; the plight of racial minorities is a thing of the past.
To many well-intentioned people this seems to be true. We are certainly a nation in which it is less acceptable to be openly racially bigoted (
kinda) than it once was. Lynchings are way down. And, anecdotally at least, young people are less likely to fraternize and socialize in their own individual communities. It is probably fair to say that there is probably less naked, open racial prejudice now than there was decades ago, generally speaking.
But individual bigotry is only one kind of racism, and, while noxious, perhaps the least dangerous sort. Far more deadly is institutionalized racism: racism built into the structures and woven into the fabric of society, hidden racism that undergirds and supports the rest of society, that we do not perceive to be racist when in fact that is what it is and the effect that it has.
Arguments are buried in spoilers for organization.
I think I've exceeded my word-count limit here [EDIT-had to break this into several posts - read below for more], so just a few more quick hits:
links upon request
-the private prison industry assisted in drafting the Arizona immigration law
-The federal judiciary is in something like open rebellion over a new law addressing the sentences to be meted out to people convicted of selling crack cocaine.
A couple of weeks ago, for instance, a judge in Massachusetts said he found it “unendurable” to have to impose sentences that are “both unjust and racist.”
-5/500 sentencing, being caught with 5 grams of crack cocaine carries the same sentence as 500 grams of powder. Use is sharply divided by wealth. Furthermore, crack users in America were made up of 52% whites and 38% blacks, African Americans accounted for 88% of those sentenced for crack cocaine offenses, while whites accounted for just 4.1%
-Whites visit the emergency room visits for overdoses at the triple the rate that blacks do
-the record drop in unemployment among non-college educated black me in the 90s had nothing to do with increased employment... as everyone else got jobs, non-college educated black men just went to prison.
-Jails (allegedly) segregate based on race for the purpose of directing violence at other inmates as a control measure
Are you subconsciously racist? (10minute game, NSFW)
http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect/
Are Americans?
tl;dr
Selective enforcement of drug crimes is the crux of the issue.
Drug use is relatively constant throughout racial and socio-economic divisions.