The People's Record

The realities of the New Jim Crow: The incarceration rate for African-Americans is so high that young black men without a high school diploma are more likely to go to jail than to find a job, thereby causing the breakup of families and instilling further poverty upon them.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, locking up about 500 people for every 100,000 residents, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (The US has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners.)

The incarceration rate for African-Americans is about 3,074 per 100,000 residents, which is more than six times as high as the national average. Black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma are particularly vulnerable: with an incarceration rate of 40 percent, they are more likely to end up behind bars than in the workforce, Pew Charitable Trusts reports.

“Jails & prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangers to each other.” - Angela Davis