Ta-Nehisi Coates rattles off some stats that never stop being devastating, even as they become less shocking:
The United States has 756 people in jail per 100,000 people. No other country has more than 700, and only two are over 600 Russia (629) and Rwanda (604).
Of the 2.3 million people in American jails, 806,000 are black males. African-Americans -- males and females -- make up .6 percent of the entire world's population, but African-American males -- alone -- make up 8 percent of the entire world's prison population. I know there are people who think some kind of demon culture could create a world where a group that makes up roughly one in 200 citizens of the world, comprises one in 12 of its prisoners. But I kind of doubt it.
It's important to note this stuff, because my general impression is that few people think about it, and the kind of people you might assume don't care are actually surprised to hear about the scale of the problem. Mark Kleiman tells audiences that the rate of imprisonment of black men in the U.S. exceeds the rate of imprisonment in the Soviet Union during the height of the Gulag, which for obvious symbolic reasons was startling enough to an audience at the conservative American Enterprise Institute that many of them gasped in shock after he said it.
