02/08/01 06:59 PM: Three quarters of all 18-year-old

Three quarters of all 18-year-old black male urban dwellers will be arrested and jailed before they turn 36. Isn’t that frightening? Try this: The American prison population is over 2 million, and 6.5 million Americans are under “correctional supervision” of some sort. Something is wrong here. These statistics point out two things. First, way too many people are going to prison. In fact, so many people are being locked up that incarceration has now become a business. Far from your average county jail, many prisons are now built and run by private companies. Second, minorities make up an inordinate percentage of the prison population. I have barely even scratched the surface of that issue. It has a lot to do with the drug war. You can argue all you want that it is not aimed at minorities, but the fact remains that blacks are fourteen times as likely to do time for drug offenses than are whites despite the fact that drug usage rates are more or less equal among the two. This trend will only continue until people realize that not sending every petty offender to state prison does not make one “soft on crime.”

Kevin Peliusczak