[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Y O U N G V O I C E S I N T H E H O O Dabout 14 percent.In the 1980s alone the population quadrupled.Likethe general U.S.prison population, California continued recordgrowth throughout the nineties despite steep declines in violentcrime.The state’s census concluded that between 1990 and 2000 thenumber of people incarcerated in federal and state prisons andcounty jails expanded by nearly 40 percent.By the late 1990s California’s prison population was greater than France’s and Germany’sprisoner counts—combined.It was nearly ten times the level of theearly 1970s.The growth was fueled by several factors: increase drug-related arrests and convictions, mandatory sentencing, passage of the“three strikes” law, and an unusually high rate of parole violatorsbeing returned to the corrections system.Criminal justice activists in the state wondered out loud ifCalifornia’s “race to incarcerate” was a response to the dramatic de-mographic shifts that are remaking the state’s population and per-sonality.As recently as 1970 whites accounted for nearly 80 percent of California’s total population.By 2000 that number had fallen to just below 60 percent.And as population projections have maintained forat least the last fifteen years, California is well on its way to becoming a state where whites will soon be a numerical minority.By 2000nearly one-third, 32 percent, of California’s population was Latino.Asian Americans, growing annually, made up 11 percent of the state’spopulation.Blacks made up 9 percent of California’s population.In addition to its changing racial composition, California wastrending younger by 2000.Thirty-seven percent of California’s pop-ulation is under the age of twenty-five, and a growing percentage ofthat demographic is made up of Latino, Asian, and black youths.Cal-ifornia’s seismic racial shifts have stirred paranoia, a sense that a once great state is being overrun and even undermined by the onset of amajor racial makeover.As they surveyed the statistics confirming the state’s surge of pris-oners, many in the criminal justice activist community argued thatthe increasing investment in incarceration and the decreasing invest-ment in education created a situation in which California’s most171
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
