is so punitive, and why, as a nation, we
incarcerate so many of our citizens of color.
The consequences of parental incarceration for African American mothers, children, and grandparent caregivers
It's less expensive to educate than to
incarcerate. With continued and future support from corporations, public citizens, and the incarcerated, CCEF will continue to break multigenerational incarceration by investing in education versus incarceration.
Creative Corrections Education Foundation
Imprisonment, Scott Christianson argues, has been a defining feature of American life since Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World with a crew composed largely of impressed sailors and until the present day, when federal, state, and local prisons and jails
incarcerate almost two million people.
With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America
Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project notes in The Race to
Incarcerate (New Press, 1999) that African American defendants are three to four times as likely to get the death penalty, while Tonry reports that blacks charged with a broad range of offenses are more likely to be convicted than whites and that black convicts generally serve longer sentences than their white counterparts.
Captive audience
It costs the state 10 times more to
incarcerate inmates than to educate them.
Learning under lockdown: prison college programs, decimated by a '94 crime bill, have begun a slow comeback. As more people of color attend classes behind bars, the politics of prison education are once again up for debate. (Colorblind: Higher Education)
As the prison population continues its costly growth, debate on the issue of incarceration seems to revolve around not whether or not to
incarcerate offenders but just how hard to throw the book at them.
America behind bars: our criminal-justice policy imprisons us all