For the first time since 1972, the total number of people held in U.S. prisons has gone down. And, for the second year in a row, the number of persons under supervision – such as parole – by state departments of correction, decreased.
Does this mean the beginning of the end of mass Black incarceration in the United States? Not hardly. That would require an historic reversal of a nationwide policy to find new places to put Black people who refused to stay “in their place,” in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. There is little in the current American political conversation that indicates white people have reconsidered – or even acknowledged – their extraordinarily broad support for placing more Black people in captivity over the past 40 years than at any time since slavery.
It takes the government almost a year to tabulate the past year’s prison statistics, so the latest numbers are from 2010. They show about 7.1 million people under some kind of correctional supervision – one out of every 33. That’s down 1.3 percent from 2009, the year that saw the first decrease in supervision in two generations. The total population in state and federal prisons – not counting local jails – stood at 1.6 million inmates, down six-tenths of one percent. State prison populations decreased by almost 11,000, and local jails by almost 19,000, but federal prison populations grow by eight/tenths of one percent, to almost 210,000 inmates. That was, however, the smallest percentage increase in a generation – since 1980.
Half of the states reported decreases in their prison populations, with California and Georgia shrinking the most.
Read More Here.
I disagree that the likelyhood of despicable, mass Black incarceration will not soon end. We are convinced that parole will be reinstated in Florida and have launched a drive to form a united front statewide that will demand the support of their legislators and will make their voices heard at the polls. Forgotten Majority, Inc. is working toward this end with over 10,000 signed petitions to date in addition to the emails being sent daily by citizens of Florida to their lawmakers in Tallahassee. We will strive relentlessly for the resurrection of Parole in Florida.