You Should Know About: An American Issue

Although most of my current focus is on my health/happiness/adjustment to living in Japan, this article in the NYT speaks to much of the work I previously did in America.

As many of you know, I spent my first few years as an adult working with cons, ex-cons, and troubled youth. My favorite job in college was leading the Prison Ministry program for my school, working in a close-security men`s prison in Minnesota. Immediately after graduation I attended a conference of artists, activists and prison employees, concerned about the U.S. system of incarceration. After university I spent several years mentoring youth-of-color in Portland, many of whom were at risk of falling into the `criminal justice` system. Most recently I volunteered for a Portland program assisting recently-released ex-cons as they adjust to life on the outside. This work is meaningful, rewarding, humbling, and so painful. The disproportionate number of inmates that identify as people-of-color is troubling; racial profiling and economic disadvantages are just two possible reasons for this American travesty.



September 30, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Jena, O. J. and the Jailing of Black America
By ORLANDO PATTERSON

This full article is at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/opinion/30patterson.html?th&emc=th. My selected excerpt:

"America has more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world. Black Americans, a mere 13 percent of the population, constitute half of this country’s prisoners. A tenth of all black men between ages 20 and 35 are in jail or prison; blacks are incarcerated at over eight times the white rate.
The effect on black communities is catastrophic: one in three male African-Americans in their 30s now has a prison record, as do nearly two-thirds of all black male high school dropouts. These numbers and rates are incomparably greater than anything achieved at the height of the Jim Crow era. What’s odd is how long it has taken the African-American community to address in a forceful and thoughtful way this racially biased and utterly counterproductive situation.
How, after decades of undeniable racial progress, did we end up with this virtual gulag of racial incarceration?"