[cue Inner Circle]
“Bad boys!
“Whatcha want? Whatcha want?
“Whatcha gonna do-oo
“When da sheriff John Brown come f’you...?”
Posted on 03/03/2009 7:07:29 AM PST by BBell
BATON ROUGE -- One out of every 55 Louisiana residents is behind bars, a higher incarceration rate than any other state, according to research released today by a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group.
One in 26 Louisiana adults is under correctional control, if probation and parole are included, the group found.
The Pew Center for the States study of 2007 U.S. Census data found that Louisiana's incarceration rate spiked by 272 percent since 1982. That rate of increase is far from the nation's highest of 357 percent in North Dakota, and not far from Mississippi's 256 percent increase. Neighbor states Texas and Arkansas have seen increases around 200 percent.
The Pew group argued that, particularly during a recession, rising costs of incarceration should push states to reduce prison spending by moving more nonviolent inmates out of prisons and into community-based parole and probation systems. One researcher pointed to Texas, where he said a recent shift in the politics of corrections has led to policy changes and a leveling off of that state's incarceration rate.
"I think what we're seeing is that the politics of this issue are changing," said Adam Gelb, director of Pew's public safety performance project. "The old question used to be, 'How can we demonstrate we're tough on crime?' More and more, policy-makers from both sides of the aisle are asking a better question, which is: 'How do we get taxpayers a better return on their dollars?"
Gelb said Texas had saved $500 million by expanding parole and probation, while stopping the construction of new prisons.
Louisiana's prison's chief said he's thinking along the same lines -- but is unable to back a big shift toward parole and probation, partly because those parts of his agency are already overburdened with work.
"Some states are paroling people out, but we're not
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
It's been some time since I read that data, so...
* White persons, percent, 2007 (a) 65.1%
* Black persons, percent, 2007 (a) 31.9%
* American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2007 (a) 0.6%
* Asian persons, percent, 2007 (a) 1.4%
* Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2007 (a) 0.2%
* Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2007 0.9%
* Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2007 3.2%
* White persons not Hispanic, percent, 2007 62.3%
Hard to say who has a rougher life there, the inmates or the horse under that corpulent cop.
[cue Inner Circle]
“Bad boys!
“Whatcha want? Whatcha want?
“Whatcha gonna do-oo
“When da sheriff John Brown come f’you...?”
“It made my heart ache, you know, to see all these beautiful black men in the joint...the warriors should be out there helping the masses. I felt that way, I was real naïve. Six weeks I was up there and I talked to the brothers. I talked to ‘em, and …Thank God we got penitentiaries!” - Richard Pryor
I grew up in Louisiana and I remember driving in Baton Rouge and every other car was swerving. There weren’t that many tourists!
Louisiana’s like to drink, not just tourists. Last I checked, Louisiana had the highest alcohol consumption per capita in the nation, despite the northern half being dry. It might not be dry anymore, we were losing that battle when I left.
The cops will thump Louisianas too. And sometimes when they thump them they get incarcerated and thus the high incarceration rate.
I will say this, I spent a couple of semesters going to all the cajun festivals. There is a big difference the closer you get to the cities in the drinking. The small town festivals drink too, but they don’t drink to excess. The closer you get to the cities, the drinking to excess goes way up. But that ain’t tourists, that’s just city folk.
Go ahead and say it. Louisiana has the highest percentage of blacks of any state. And, unfortunately, the number of felonies committed by blacks far exceeds their percentage of population. In fact the number of felonies and violent crimes committed by a very small number of blacks (generally young black men between the ages of 16 and 30, about 1-2% of the population as a whole) makes up over HALF of all violent crimes. And most of those crimes are against other blacks. Just like in Africa.
I guess you can take the black out of Africa, but you can’t take the Africa out of the black.
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