Frightening statistic of the day - Incarceration Rates

-
From Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress by Becky Petit.
Five percent of white men and 28 percent of black men  born between 1975 and 1979 spent at least a year in prison before reaching  age thirty-five. The risks of spending time in prison for this birth cohort were  significantly higher among high school dropouts: 28 percent of white and 68 percent of black dropouts had spent at least a year in prison by 2009
(emphasis mine).  If this doesn't give you pause, well, it should.
But wait, it gets worse.  Check out the following stats
  • > 1% of American adults is living in prison
  • >3% of American adults is under some form of correctional supervision  (probation, parole, etc.)
  • Shortly, >30% of black men will have served time in prison
Keep those numbers in mind as you walk around today. And remember, this isn't happening in "that bad neighborhood over on the other side of the tracks", its happening everywhere. We are incarcerating people at a rate unequaled in history, and the sheer numbers are mind-boggling.

28% of whites and 68% of black dropouts have spent at least a year in prison

This is all around you.  This is America today. 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her
Read more

Cannonball Tree!

-
Image
Spotted this one just outside the Ravindra Kalakshetra in Bangalore .  Its called the Cannonball Tree , but is - technically (i.e., in Latin, if thats your metier) - Couroupita Guianensis , or ನಾಗಲಿಂಗ ಪುಷ್ಪಾ  in Kannada. The fruits look like Cannonballs (well, d-uh), and the flowers are really quite amazing, and pretty ludicrously distinctive...
Read more

Visualizing Prime Numbers

-
Image
From Jason Davies , we have El Patron de Los Primos , probably one of the coolest prime number visualizer that I've seen.  For every Natural number, he draws a periodic curve that intersects at that number and each of its multiples.  Needless to say, prime numbers are touched by only two curves (itself and 1 ). You can scroll to the right, and move up the prime food change. (The image above is a screen grab.  Go here to see the actual thing)
Read more