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Opinion

Prison statistics show racial divide

Lashic Patterson
Opinion Columnist 

The American agenda always thrives on unimportant compost.

While the nation focuses on political candidates attending Playboy mansion parties and on vilifying Janet Jackson for exposing a breast, which happened more than two years ago, more pressing issues need to be addressed.

One of these issues is black and Hispanic people in the criminal justice system. 

The prison population has more black and Hispanic men serving time than men from other racial or ethnic groups. Women from these two groups are not absent in these statistics. Ed Reed, a criminal justice expert and professor at several colleges in Seattle, has found that there are 86,000 Hispanic women and 231,000 black women in prison. 

Many blacks and Hispanics are incarcerated for using and selling narcotics.

Another alarming statistic is the number of black-on-black crimes.

In an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, talk show host Bill Maher questioned Spike Lee on whether whites killing blacks the way that many blacks are killing each other would cause black communities to be more willing to put an end to the high black murder rate. 

The question came from a comment that Bob Herbert, a columnist of the New York Times and also a black male stating that if white people did to black people what black people do to black people "there would be rioting from coast to coast." 

Manning Marable, a Tri-State Defender columnist and political science and history professor, found statistics from 1986 that show 50 percent of all U.S. murder victims are black Americans, and 94 percent of those who murder blacks are blacks. 

This data has not changed much in 2006. The main culprit behind this is the fact that not one white person has been sent to Death Row for murdering a black person and also that many black on black violent crimes are ignored by the police and courts. 

However, current data shows that 70 percent of black men who are on Death Row had committed crimes against whites. 

There is a racial value system in the criminal justice system that targets blacks and Hispanics and ignores their murdering each other, and since this country was built upon racism, deceit, cheap labor and violence, these statistics should not be shocking, and should explain why so much is done to overshadow more important issues. 

It is a big pill to swallow, and America is choking, yet unwilling to ask for the Heimlich maneuver.

Send comments to dccampus@mail.uh.edu