Almost 10 Percent Of Young Black Men Behind Bars

While violent crime and property crime declined last year, there was an alarming increase in the nation's prison population, according to a newly released report.At the end of last year, there were 1,470,045 men and women in state and federal prisons in the United States. Including the inmates in city and county jails and incarcerated juvenile offenders, the total number of Americans behind bars was 2,212,475 on Dec. 31, 2003, said Allen Beck, chief of corrections statistics for the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics and an author of the report. The report estimated that 44 percent of state and federal prisoners in 2003 were Black, compared with 35 percent White, 19 percent Latino and 2 percent other races. Clearly, there has been little change over the last decade or so. Among the more than 1.4 million sentenced inmates at the end of 2003, an estimated 403,165 were Black men between ages 20 and 39. At the end of 2003, 9.3 percent of Black men between the ages of 25 to 29 were in prison, compared with 2.6 percent of Hispanic men and 1.1 percent of White men in the same age group. [more]

• Number of Female Prisoners Increases at a Higher Rate than Male Prisoners [more]
• Black women are three-fourths of the record-setting number of females in state and local prisons, according to a criminal justice expert. [more]
• Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment [more]