Bowker, Lee H. Prisoner Subcultures. Lexington Books: Lexington Mass, 1977.

Davis, Angela, et al. If They Come in the Morning Voices of Resistance. The Third Press: New York, 1971.

Franklin, H. Bruce. Prison Literature in America. Lawrence Hill & Company, Westport Conn, 1982.

Van Deburg, William L. The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992.

Is Prison Becoming the Norm for Black Males?

In the last two decades the population of black male inmates grew three times as fast as the number of black men enrolled in higher education. Authored by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, the study showed that in 2000 there were 791,000 men in jail or prison and 603,000 enrolled in colleges or universities. In 1980, the study noted, those numbers were 143,000 and 463,700 respectively. Although comparisons of the two categories are not symmetrical, students comprise a narrower age range than prison inmates. The difference in numbers over two decades reveals the corrosive ef

Clark Atlanta University (GA)– Females (71%), Males (29%)

“Cellblocks or Classrooms.” The funding of Higher Education and corrections and its impact on African American men makes perfectly clearly the society’s investment priority’s producer commensurate results. During the 1980s and 1990s state spending on higher education. Between 1980 and 2000, corrections share of state and local spending grew by 104 percent while higher educations share of state and local spending declined by 21 percent African Americans comprises about half of that total. One third of young black men are under some form of penal surveillance. Speaking before a packed auditorium in mid November, scholar and activist Angela Davis argued that rising black incarceration rates can be understood only in the context of a hundred-year-old link between crime and race and class and oppression. Immediately following the civil war, Black codes created a list of crimes punishable only when committed by black people. Mississippi made it a crime for African Americans to be unemployed or drunk, or to have run away, neglected children, or handled money carelessly. The convict lease system farmed black and a few white prisoners out to work in factories, mines, and fields that built the New south. Through a gaping loophole in the 13th Amendment, politicians replaced slavery with a penal system designed to control black labor. Fredrick Douglass claimed that many white criminals escaped punishment by blacking their faces during a robbery or a murder. Police always found an innocent black man to blame for the crime since, as Douglass pointed out, all Negroes look alike. Douglass claim sounds like a case about a year ago in which a white Boston man claimed a black man had killed his wife and children. A black man suspect was discovered and found guilty by a jury before the white man’s brother came forward with the truth: the white man had killed his own family.

As prisons take up more and more space on the social landscape, other government programs that have previously sought to respond to socially need such as Temporary Assistance to needy Families are being squeezed out of existence. The deterioration of public education, including prioritizing discipline and security over learning in public schools located in poor communities, is directly related to the prison”solution.” As prisons proliferate in U.S. society, private capital has become enmeshed in the punishment industry. And precisely because of their profit potential, prisons are becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy. If the notion of punishment as a source of potentially stupendous profits is disturbing itself, then the strategic dependence on racist structures and ideologies to render mass punishment palatable and profitable is even more troubling (Franklin, 1982).

fect of our incarceration epidemic on the health of the African American community.

Some topics in this essay:
Abu Jamal, South Carolina, Van Deburg, African Americans, Temporary Assistance, Douglass Negroes, America CCA, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Asia Caribbean, criminal justice, justice system, criminal justice system, prison labor, penal system, race class, black prison, george jackson, prison experience, people color, incarceration rates, international human rights, human rights standards, rights standards private, share local spending,