Racial Wealth Gap and Mass Incarceration

Is the massive growth in both racial imprisonment and the racial wealth gap a coincidence or are they intertwined; is there a cause and effect relationship?

In 1982, the War on Drugs became the law; as it was implemented with racial profiling, the War on Drugs became a War on Black and Hispanic males.  Over the past 35 years, the prison population has exploited.

In 1984, the wealth gap between white families and Afro American families was $20,000.  By 2007 the wealth gap had multiplied fourfold to $95,000.  Black wealth per family remained static while white wealth grew.  In a 2015 article, "Closing the racial wealth gap," the racial wealth gap had grown to $236,500.

In their book The Spirit Level:   Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (2009), Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett present data which show a correlation between economic inequality and incarceration.  They compared 22 countries and concluded that "more people are imprisoned in more unequal countries" with the United States leading the way in both economic inequality and incarceration.

Wilkinson and Pickett then compared all 50 states and found the same correlation between inequality and imprisonment.  "More people are imprisoned in more unequal states."  For example, "Louisiana imprisons people at more than six times the rate of Minnesota."

In The New Jim Crow (2010),  Michelle Alexander document the growth in the U.S. prison population:

"In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions [such as marijuana possession] accounting for the majority of the increase.  The United States now has the highest incarceration numbers in the world dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. . . .  The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid."

In 2017, Thomas Shapiro, America's top expert in racial economic inequality has updated us with the latest data on our horrible and expanding racial wealth gap in his book Toxic Inequality.

A concise and quality summary of the racial wealth gap can be found in The New Republic, "Closing the racial wealth gap."  I highly recommend it.