Lawrence Bobo of Harvard University tackles the issue of racialized mass incarceration in a column at the root.com which is excellent and worth reading.

Bobo makes three major arguments in the piece — the first is that the criminal-punishment binge disproportionately targets poor blacks and has even become the norm:

First, incarceration is so extreme and so biased on the basis of class and race that prison has become an ordinary life experience for poorly educated blacks, in a manner not characteristic of any other segment of American society.

My Harvard colleague sociologist Bruce Western, in his book Punishment and Inequality in America, compared rates of incarceration for two generations of men: those born in the five years immediately following World War II and those born during the height of the Vietnam War era (1965 to 1969).

Black men in the post-World War II generation who did not graduate from high school had a less than one-in-five chance of going to jail or prison by the time they were 30 years old. Similarly educated black men born in the Vietnam era, however, had a three-in-five chance of spending some time in prison by the time they reached the same age. That is, nearly 60 percent of black men in this more recent cohort were destined for jail or prison — a figure that is sure to be worse for the most recent cohorts of poor and poorly educated black men.

This now means that exposure to jail and prison is a more common experience for a generation of poor blacks than is, say, membership in a labor union, service in the military or receipt of a variety of government benefits.

Next he focuses on the high costs of incarceration. Something that I have been blogging about consistently.

Second, the growth in state expenditures on jails and prisons has far outstripped the growth in all other state expenditures, with the exception of Medicaid. A 2009 Pew Center on the States report estimates that, on average, it costs $29,000 a year to house each inmate. In 2007 we spent $49 billion on corrections overall (jails, prisons, and supervision of those on parole and probation). That figure, which is four times what it was a decade earlier, reflects growth over the decade of more than 127 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Next and perhaps most importantly the criminal-punishment binge has not significantly reduced crime:

The best estimates suggest that as little as 5 percent of the decline in crime rates over the last decade-and-a-half can be attributed to the new mass-incarceration society.

Finally, he ends with this point which I think cannot be stated often enough, in fact it should be shouted from the rooftops of every state capitol:

This punitiveness binge would never have gone on for so long or reached such extreme levels if those being swept up into the criminal-justice system weren’t largely black and poor. Whether you call it the carceral state, the fourth stage of racial oppression or the New Jim Crow, the situation is unacceptable.

Read the entire article, it is excellent and concisely lays out the key problems with racialized mass incarceration.