why are black men being incarcerated in larger numbers today compared to other groups?

I believe that today, black men are incarcerated at a larger rate because of the institutions that this country has set up to keep them marginalized. For example, the drug laws in this country have sought out low income and black communities in order to penalize them more than wealthy and predominately white drug users. I forget the exact number, but I know that the drug “crack” is almost 100 times more illegal in the judicial system than its counterpart “cocaine”, despite “crack” simply being a cheaper version of “cocaine”. Most of these laws that target lower income Americans include minimum sentences that judges are forced to hand down to these drug users who are often first time offenders. So through this system, a young, poor individual can get caught with drugs one time and be forced to spend upwards of 10 years in prison. These individuals are often black men. If, however, this individual was a white male caught with a different drug, there is no minimum sentence and they would most likely not face any jail time or see any major punishment. Overall, the “war on drugs” has turned into a massive failure that has managed to create a system that targets certain areas and individuals and punish them at an unjust rate.

Once these individuals see jail time or face the punishment for their crimes, our system does a really bad job of bringing these individuals back into society. This means that the black men who are jailed at a higher rate have a really hard time making a successful career or establishing strong families. Because of this, these individuals are forced back into the life that got them in trouble in the first place. Often, entire areas and cultures are based around members selling and using drugs and black men who are constantly in and out of jail because there is no potential for upward mobility. For these reasons, there is a large amount of black individuals who see jail time at a much higher rate.