BLACK MEN - Left Out and Locked Up

There are an estimated 1.5 million Black men in prison and another 3.5 million on probation. Black males make up more than 70 percent of the total prison population, even though they make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population.

The alarming incarceration rates of Black men is not a new phenomenon, but one that has reverberated in news headlines and scholarly reports for a decade.

Impoverished living conditions coupled with the failures of public education in urban school districts, unemployment and a criminal justice system primed to incarcerate Black men have created a crippling symbiosis for thousands of Black men who find themselves locked up in America’s jails and prisons.

A Common Thread
Demico Boothe, a 35-year-old Black man from Tennessee, can recount every day of his 12-year sentence spent mostly in a federal prison. The slave-like chains being the most memorable.

“I would watch the men emerge from the bus to enter the facility, 40 men chained together at the legs and shackled at the wrists. Often, I would count: 36 Black, two White, and one Hispanic. The next week: 35 Black, three Hispanic, two White,” Boothe says.

A common thread among the Black male prisoners, according to Boothe, was their lack of education. “The majority of Black men in jail can barely read, and there are many who simply cannot. The lack of education and the level of ignorance among many of the men was striking,” says Boothe, who released a book on Black male imprisonment last year
entitled, Why So Many Black Men Are in Prison: A Comprehensive Account of How And Why the Prison Industry Has Become a Predatory
Entity in the Lives of African-American Men (XLIbris Corp., 2006).

The lack of education plays an integral role in the cradle-to-prison pipeline. In inner cities across the country, more than half of all Black men do not finish high school, limiting their ability to find employment. In 2001, only 42.8 percent of Black male students graduated from high school compared with 70 percent of their White male counterparts and 56 percent of African-Americans overall. In 2000, 65 percent of Black male high school dropouts in their twenties were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, that percentage grew to 72.