Human Rights Watch has released its 2011 World Annual Report. The report underscores some important facts and statistics about racial disparities in the U.S. mass incarceration system:

As of June 2009, the U.S. continued to have both the largest incarcerated population (2,297,400, a decrease of 0.5 percent since December 2008) and the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world (748 inmates per 100,000 residents).

The burden of incarceration falls disproportionately on members of racial and ethnic minorities, a disparity which cannot be accounted for solely by differences in criminal conduct: black non-Hispanic males are incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of white non-Hispanic males and 2.6 times that of Hispanic males.

One in 10 black males aged 25-29 were in prison or jail in 2009; for Hispanic males the figure was 1 in 25; for white males only 1 in 64.

Blacks constitute 33.6 percent of drug arrests, 44 percent of persons convicted of drug felonies in state court, and 37 percent of people sent to state prison on drug charges, even though they constitute only 13 percent of the U.S. population and blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at equivalent rates.

Other Facts:

In 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained between 380,000 and 442,000 non-citizens in some 300 detention facilities, at an annual cost of U.S. $1.7 billion.

Human Rights Watch’s own analysis of government data showed that three-quarters of non-citizens deported between 1997 and 2007 were nonviolent or low-level offenders.

There are 2,574 youth offenders (persons under the age of 18 at the time they committed their offense) serving life without parole in U.S. prisons. There are no known youth offenders serving the sentence anywhere else in the world.

As of August 2010, 88,500 prison and jail inmates had experienced some form of sexual victimization between October 2008 and December 2009.