Black people are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the white rate

Evidence

Racial profiling is the through line that points to the inequity in the criminal justice system, which finds Black people incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white people. I saw this firsthand in my work with the NAACP and through the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, an advisory committee established by the Connecticut General Assembly that I had been part of since its inception in 2012. In 1999, Alvin W. Penn submitted legislation prohibiting the practice of racial profiling after he, a Black state senator from Bridgeport, Connecticut, routinely got pulled over by police officers in Fairfield County. The law requires data reporting for all traffic stops and collecting and analyzing all racial disparities. I was appointed to be a member of the committee due to my role in the NAACP. Racial profiling has always been a cause I have embraced—I have dedicated much of my career to eradicating it. How ironic that my enslaved ancestors were possibly victims of the first incident of racial profiling in the history of this country. It all begins with these daguerreotypes. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 658

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to death-in-prison and mass incarceration statistics from the reader’s broader criminal-justice reading; also frames the archival-justice thesis of this book.