…about the injustice of the justice system, particularly in a state like Wisconsin.
With headlines like this, “BBC Deplores Wisconsin’s Black Imprisonment Rate,” it not only a tragedy, Wisconsin’s and the country’s black eye gets broadcast around the world.
The unconscionably high incarceration rate of African Americans everywhere in the country, and particularly this terrible situation in Wisconsin where it’s nearly double the national average, is tragic for so many reasons and in so many ways. But here is a certainly that the rate of criminals just not that much higher — or higher at all — among African Americans than it is among whites or the population in general.
Relatively recent changes in sentencing laws, including reducing the dreadful disparities between penalties for crimes involving powder cocaine and crack cocaine, should help correct the awful disparity between the incarceration rates of black Americans and the rest of the general population.
Would I be overly optimistic to think that perhaps other disparities in the treatment of minorities such as African Americans and Latinos might be also be erased?
Anatomy of a Trial blog 