Modern US mass incarceration dwarfs prior decades and falls on people of color.

Evidence

The numbers are notorious, almost numbing. Ten million enslaved Africans perished in Middle Passage, on reasonable estimates. Death en passant to a life more often than not worse than death. Starved, worked, beaten, suffocated, diseased to death. Numbers as large again prematurely killed in new world slavery. Systemically, brutally worked, beaten, saddened or maddened into death. Seven million aboriginal inhabitants of Australia wiped out by European colonization and modernization. A lynching every other day in the southern states of the US throughout the 1890s. Ten million battered into death by Leopold’s vicious regime in the Congo between 1885 and 1908, half of the population of the area castrated and delimbed and diseased in a brutality matched only by the six million Jews and nameless others gassed and shot and tortured to death by Aryan superiority in the 1940s, for which the Congolese experience served as a pre-cursive laboratory. Each death exceptional in transnational processes of violence and violation all too sadly not. One million people murdered in 1994 in Rwanda in the ethnoracial name of not belonging. In one month. More than 70 percent of the more than two million people rotting in US prisons (up from 200,000 less than 40 years ago) people of color. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 22

Categorization

• XREF: US prison growth from 200,000 to over two million in 40 years with 70% people of color connects to threatened-privilege literature on racialized criminalization across the reader’s axes. — connects to: People of color form a third of the population but three-quarters of US prisoners.; US prison population exploded tenfold while remaining majority people of color; Jail incarceration rates fell for Black and Hispanic people but rose for Whites, 2005-2017 — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 621 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Reader may want to chase whether the prison-race gap is an institutional discrimination axis analogous to labor-market discrimination when testing the contact/institution gap.

Broader Connections

• People of color form a third of the population but three-quarters of US prisoners. #corroborates (0.95)
• US prison population exploded tenfold while remaining majority people of color #corroborates (0.90)
• Black and Latino people exceed 60 percent of the US prison population. #corroborates (0.85)
• US incarceration rose sevenfold since the early 1970s #corroborates (0.85) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 835
• Jail incarceration rates fell for Black and Hispanic people but rose for Whites, 2005-2017 #qualifies (0.80) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 621
• U.S. prison population grew tenfold in three decades #corroborates (0.80)