Why does Wisconsin send so many black people to jail?

[hue]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24119398

For decades in the US, the incarceration rate for African Americans has been much higher than for whites, a racial disparity the US Attorney General Eric Holder has described as "shameful".

In part to address this, Mr Holder unveiled a policy shift that will mean the US locks up fewer people convicted of non-violent, drugs offences.

The state that locks up the highest percentage of black men is Wisconsin. The national average is 6.7%, but in Wisconsin it's 12.8% - more than three percentage points higher than the second-placed state, Oklahoma.

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cross posted in GD

[Jackpine Radical]

1. To put that statistic another way,

Wisconsin is about 5% black, but about 50% of the inmates in state prisons are black. When you subtract out the other minorities (mostly Native American & Latino), whites are a minority in our prisons. If you are a Wisconsin black, your odds of being in prison are somewhat more than 10 times your odds if you're white.

[Scuba]

2. Can't blame this on Walker either. It's been that way for a long time. Milwaukee is ...

... home to our largest black population, and they are suffering from grinding poverty in addition to an armada of other social problems that wear on the residents. Crime and detention rates are very high there, but the problem is statewide. Blacks and other minorities are profiled and arrested at a far higher rate than whites. And we incarcerate a whole bunch of folks.

By happy coincidence, our former Governor, Tommy Thompson had a passionate love of Portland Cement and lavished State spending on the highway and prison industries to help satisfy his craving for concrete.

If we spent half as much on Milwaukee schools as we do on prisons around the State we'd need a lot fewer prisons.