Sunday 27 December 2015

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration -- Ta-Nehisi Coates

From the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, America's incarceration rate doubled. By the mid 1990s, it had doubled again. "By 2007 it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000," says author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates in the October 2015 cover story of The Atlantic, in an article entitled "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration." He adds that the United States "now counts for less than 5 percent of the world's inhabitants -- and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated -- 10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers."