U.S. America Not Locking As Many Black Folk Into Prison Forever Hooray!

Nobody say anything, less'n we jinx it, but a new study shows that we might in fact no longer be locking up black people at a rate six times that of their white-people counterparts! USA! USA! Oh wait no, we read it wrong. Black men are still being incarcerated at a rate of 6.4 black guys to every 1 white dude. BUT! This is down almost a fifth over the past decade, when they had been imprisoned at a rate of almost 8 to 1! And black ladies are staying out of prison like a champ, while white chicks are making jail the hip new trend! Obviously, we blame Lindsay Lohan.

There are numbers and whatnot over at the link, and we suggest not delving into them too deeply lest you find that despite the rate of black women's incarceration dropping by a metric fuckton, and white women's skyrocketing (meth, obvs), black women are still three times more likely to go to prison than the white women are, which can kind of take away from the feeling of postracial nice-time we all thought this story was going to be. THANKS A LOT, GAWKER. 

Anyhoozles, it would not be a story about the intersection of race, society and the law unless we included some asshat somewhere mouthing off about why we need guns to protect us from urbanoids. So we guess this is not a story about the intersection of race, society and the law, because we don't feel like scouring the bowels of the internet this morning! You're welcome!

And we certainly won't point to these well-known studies showing that light -skinned black people get sentences to match. (We mean "lighter" sentences. That was clear, right? No? Aw, fuck it.) Because it would obviously be racist of us to point out that race might have something to do with incarceration and sentencing.

Like, that would probably be the most racist thing in the world, pointing that out, because obviously conservatives (and judges!) don't see color, and only black people can be racist, the end.

[ TheSentencingProject , via Gawker ]