Non-White American Prisoners

According to the research conducted by Lemos (2010), non-white Americans constitute about three quarter of prisoners in the United States. Despite the fact that non-white Americans only comprise approximately a third of the United States’ total population. The country’s rate of imprisonment is extremely high if to take into account raw numbers. The statistics shows that one out of every 20 adult men is in prison (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2008). In addition, most of these inmates are between the ages of twenty and thirty four. They are composed of both males and females. However, the majority of them are males. In 2002, US Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that for every 100,000 non-white American male behind a bar, there were 4,810 Native Americans.

Evidently, non-white Americans are in prison for violating the existing laws in the United States. Thus, their high rate of imprisonment has nothing to do with racial segregation as some would tend to think. Virtually, a criminal is a criminal whether this person is white or black. As a result, imprisonment policy is based on the existing state law and federal legal policies (Lemos, 2010). Most of the blacks are imprisoned due to illegal immigration as well as their criminal activities.

 

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According to US Bureau of Justice Statistics (2008), there were 253,000 inmates for drug offences in 2005, there were 113,500 blacks, 51,000 Hispanics as well as 72,300 whites out of them. Thus, the number of the non-white inmates almost doubled the number of the whites. Most of these inmates are held in the state as well as in the federal correctional facilities (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2008). This has raised the cost of maintaining the inmates as well as the need to increase the number of prisons.

In conclusion, it is no longer a myth that there are large numbers of non-white Americans who are incarcerated in United States’ prisons due to crime related activities. From the above analysis, it is evident that American prisons constitute majorly of non-white Americans. Notably, the United States have the largest number of prisoners around the world. Nevertheless, it is surprising to find that non-white Americans comprise the largest proportion of this increasing number of inmates despite their small population number.