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.
