HAMSTERDAM VISIONS
by Rupture
“In 1993, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, the incarceration of black males was 870 per 100,000. In 2004 in the U.S., for every 100,000 people we are sending 4,919 black males to prison. And the majority of those are for nonviolent drug offenses. But we’d rather send people to prison than give them information and treatment.”
Great article on the benefits of full legalization & the drug-prison-cop industry over at Esquire.
September 1st, 2009. crackheads, drugs, ouchmybrain | 2 comments »
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:21 am
I think the way they approach problems with drugs in the states is still extremely conservative and very dated. To europeans, like me, it looks like hardly anything changed since John Lennon wrote “10 for 2″.. only the drugs changed i guess. Of course it’s hard to compare since we don’t really have this crackhead- & crystal meth-problem over here. Hope the new president lives up to the expectations and changes the drug-policy, what’s his view on this issue?
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:13 am
“The magnitude of the incarcerated population in the United States is sometimes difficult to comprehend. In 2004, U.S. prisons and jails held 2.1 million inmates, about 90 percent of whom were men. Given that the adult male workforce age 16 and older in the same year was about 78.7 million, this implies that a staggering 2.3 percent of the adult male population of the United States was in prison or jail in 2004. ”
source:
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue40/SchmittZipper40.htm
Some quick number crunching reveals that this means that about 53% of the adult male prison population are black males. Black males make up about 13% of the US male population (and that number includes children).