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Incarceration Rates of Minorities

I have chosen to do my research paper on the incarceration rate of minorities due to the fact that it peaked my interest and because it’s a topic that is highly discussed between everyone: Adults, teenagers, and just happens to be a highly argumentative topic within politics. But why is it such a sensitive topic to discuss: It's an ongoing battle that African Americans have a higher incarceration rate than whites due to racial discrimination. 1.__As of 2006, 37.5 percent of the 13 percent nationwide black population was imprisoned.__ This is the equivalent of one in every 33 black males being incarcerated, compared to the one in every 205 white males and one in 79 Hispanic males. During the 1960's, many inmates were released from prison after a new government tactic of piling as many prisoners as they could and attempting to lower crime rate. Hundreds of thousands of these inmates were unhealthy and struggled to readjust themselves to the outside world which had now transformed into poverty. This opened up a world of crime and the dramatic increase of the incarnation of minorities.

Many government programs were created to help minimize the amount of crime being committed and discovered that drugs were the main source of the problem__. 2.Over the next twenty years, people arrested for drug violations increased from 661,000 to 1,126,300__. 3.__Ten years after that, white incarceration increased by 163% while minorities increased by 216 percent.__ Half of all state and federal prison's inmates were black. The criminal justice system quickly turned their attention to drug distribution and discovered that by 2006, 81 percent of the people arrested for drug related charges were minorities while the other 27 percent were white. Drug distribution alone did not create such a high incarceration rate: 4.__In fact, if you remove the percentage of minorities imprisoned (37.5 percent) for drug charges, the new percentage would only come to a total of 37 percent minorities imprisoned.__ 5.__Most of the 37 percent comes from violent crimes: minority’s committed around 39.9 percent of all violent crimes, 52 percent of that being all the murders throughout America between 1976 and 2005.__

A researcher by the name of Blumstein did a study to prove once and for all if the high numbers of the incarceration of minorities is because of racial discrimination or if it really is based on true crime rates and statistics. Blumstein’s study concluded that between 76 and 80 percent of the minorities imprisoned is a close match to the study of minorities charged for homicide, robbery and burglary.

With all of these statistics, researches have proven that the high rate of minorities incarcerated was not, in fact, due to racial discrimination. Minorities imprisoned are in jail because they have committed the crimes and ironically enough it has raised the rate of minorities imprisoned. Despite the research that has been taken for this topic, many people still believe that it is due to racial discrimination. I believe this will be an ongoing war between and will never once and for all be settled.


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