Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Wednesday, March 05, 2008

American's In Prison

Editorial by Paul Campos:

If you knew nothing about Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama other than that Clinton is a 60-year-old white woman and Obama is a 46-year-old black man, you could still calculate the odds that each was in prison.

It won't come as any surprise that someone like Obama is, in this crude comparison, more likely to be found behind bars than someone like Clinton. What should shock people is how much more likely we are to incarcerate a 46-year-old black man than a 60-year-old white woman.

Here's one way of picturing the answer: During football games, the University of Michigan's stadium hosts about 111,000 people. If you filled the place with randomly selected 60-year-old white women, around 10 of them would turn out to be prison inmates. If you did the same with 46-year-old black men, about 5,500 would be current residents of our prisons and jails.

In other words, if we took into account only race, gender and age, Obama's chances of being in prison would be 550 times higher than Clinton's. Here's a good question for a presidential debate: "Do you think 46-year-old black men are 550 times more likely to deserve to be in prison than 60-year-old white women?"

I derived these statistics from a report published by the Pew Center last week. The report got a lot of media attention when it revealed that one out of every 100 American adults is in prison. That's startling enough, but not nearly as shocking as the fact that more than 10 percent of black men between the ages of 20 and 40 are incarcerated.

But of course other factors also play a powerful role in determining whom we choose to lock up and for how long. The most important of these is socioeconomic class. Poor people go to prison, while people with money, with rare exceptions, don't.

The extent to which we ignore that reality is highlighted by a glaring omission in the Pew Center's otherwise excellent analysis: There literally isn't a word in it about poverty. One would never guess, from reading the report, that a key factor in determining whether you go to prison and for how long is if you use powder cocaine rather than crack, or if you rob the U.S. Treasury instead of a gas station, or if you are represented by a team of private lawyers rather than a single overworked public defender.


Scripps News

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What is problematic is that these figures are not viewed as an American crisis. The effect on the number of African American males in prison undermines children, families, communities, workplace and votes. The situation undermines the future fiber of the American culture and progress.

Anonymous said...

The calculations are excellent, but the presentation is unnecessary. There is no reason to use political figures to come to this conclusion. It makes it appear more like a political campaign leaning rather than the deplorable judicial system.

All of us need to look at the excuses why black males are far more likely to be railroaded than any other ethnicity.

Age is a factor also. Prosecutors and judges, for the most part, get high on putting young lives away for much longer than is necessary. I don't question the mental instability of these dictators, I KNOW they are very, very ill when it comes to enjoying their power in shattering young lives ... for life. (Even upon so-called release from prison.)

Question the race and age factors. The conclusion will be alarming.

Anonymous said...

cut out the drugs and you cut out such sentences....

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