A gloomy woodwind arrangement proceeds the gentle explanation (helpfully paid for by a defense contractor) of what it means to have a parent incarcerated in the United States today, which seems apt given that since 2002 our country has had the highest incarceration rate in the world.
As of 2010, United States has 500 prisoners per 100,000 residents, or around 1.6 million prisoners, according to the Population Reference Bureau. 90% are male, and blacks and Latinos have much higher incarceration rates than whites:
In 2010, black men were incarcerated at a rate of 3,074 per 100,000 residents; Latinos were incarcerated at 1,258 per 100,000, and white men were incarcerated at 459 per 100,000.
"But why are people of color incarcerated at such higher rates?" the child on our fictional children's program, Shattered Innocence...Street, asks Fluffy, the Wheeping Crane. In a phrase, it's the fabulously successful War on Drugs. Here's the director of The Sentencing Project, Marc Mauer:
The federal mandatory sentencing laws were passed in 1986 following a media and political frenzy around crack cocaine…Invariably, the "crack problem" was perceived as a "black problem," a key factor that contributed to the speed with which the laws were adopted on Capitol Hill. Although crack cocaine is a derivative of powder cocaine, the crack penalties that were adopted were far harsher than for powder. Not long after passage of the legislation it became clear that 80 percent of the persons charged with a crack cocaine offense were African American, while for powder cocaine the defendants were far more likely to be white or Latino.
Although a broad body of opinion came to critique the severity of the crack laws - including the American Bar Association, federal judges, civil rights organizations, and religious leaders - it was not until 2010 that the sentencing disparity was scaled back. Under the revised drug quantity ratio, crack offenders are punished less harshly than previously, but still more so than those convicted of a powder cocaine offense.
Mauer goes on to explain to Truthout how "tough on crime" politicians are "renting" beds to private prisons in order to trim their budgets, how the prison lobby is pushing hard for tough immigration laws (who else is going to make those chicken nuggets?)
A bill to study (STUDY!) the seemingly intractable problem of mass incarceration in the United States was defeated in the Senate in 2011. A similar bill in the House currently has a 1% chance of being enacted.
Someday we might realize that the majority of these prisoners are going to be returning to our society, so perhaps our resources would be best spent in those communities?
Oh, but some of them won't be returning: one in eleven prisoners is serving a life sentence without possibility of parole.
