Latino/as and U.S. Prisons

Abstract

Already the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, the United States continues to steadily increase its prison population on an annual basis (Harrison and Beck 2006b). At year-end 2005, persons held in all U.S. federal and state prisons, territorial prisons, local jails, immigration facilities, military facilities, jails under Native American jurisdiction, and juvenile facilities totaled 2,320,359 (Harrison and Beck2006b, 1). Concomitant with the alarming expansion of the U.S. prison population is the issue that the drive to incarcerate most adversely affects communities of color, including Latino/as (Mauer 1999; Human Rights Watch 2002; Sentencing Project 2003; Walker et al. 2004; Morïn 2009). While the overall percentage of the adult population in state or federal prisons increased dramatically between 1971 and 2001, Latino/as experienced a ten-fold increase in incarceration (Bonczar 2003, 5). Based on data from the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (Harrison and Beck 2002), the Sentencing Project (2003, 1) points out that “Hispanics are the fastest growing group being imprisoned.”1KeywordsCriminal JusticeCriminal Justice SystemViolent CrimeIncarceration RatePrison PopulationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.