Whites overcounted in prison. (Racefile).Nearly all the growth in the nation's prison population over the past 12 years comes from black and Latino communities, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. a recent study from the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA NCIA Native Client Interface Architecture NCIA National Center on Institutions and Alternatives NCIA National Council of Instructional Administrators NCIA National Correctional Industries Association NCIA National Counterintelligence Authorities ). The study is the first to simultaneously separate prisoners along the lines of race and ethnicity. The study shows that between 1985 and 1997, when the prison population almost tripled, 70 percent of new inmates were African American African American Multiculture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. See Race. , Latino, or other nonwhite non·white n. A person who is not white. non  white adj. minorities. This fact had gone unnoticed because previous official prison population statistics categorized Latinos as white prisoners. The report finds that whites in prison are considerably overcounted in many states. In 1997, New Mexico reported its prison population as 83 percent white, when the actual percentage was 29 percent. In the same year, Arizona reported that 80 percent of its inmates were white when the figure was actually only 30 percent. In New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , whose prison population doubled between 1985 and 1997--with people of color Noun 1. people of color - a race with skin pigmentation different from the white race (especially Blacks) people of colour, colour, color race - people who are believed to belong to the same genetic stock; "some biologists doubt that there are important accounting for over 90 percent of the growth--only 18 percent, not the reported 43 percent, of its inmates were white. "Counting Hispanic/Latinos as whites hides the magnitude of incarceration Confinement in a jail or prison; imprisonment. Police officers and other law enforcement officers are authorized by federal, state, and local lawmakers to arrest and confine persons suspected of crimes. The judicial system is authorized to confine persons convicted of crimes. of people of color," said Barry Holman, director of public policy at NCIA. "What has been rather antiseptically referred to as a 'racial disparity' is really a gaping divide between whites and nonwhites that far outstrips minority levels in the population or in committing crime. The study also showed that in three-fourths of the states and the federal system, more than half the prison expansion in that time period came from communities of color, and in no state does the increase in prison reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the overall population. In seven jurisdictions with at least a two-thirds white statewide population, nonwhites accounted for more than 80 percent of the prison growth. Samantha Chanse, "RaceFile." Samantha is a part-time researcher at the Applied Research Center. She has worked at Californians For Justice during the campaigns to defeat Propositions 209, 227, and 226. |
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