WS MoreOrLess: Black prisoners in the US
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This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service.
I'm Ruth Alexander.
One day when the glory comes
And it was glory for singer-songwriter John Legend and the rapper Common at this year's Oscars. They won Best Song for this track, Glory, from the film Selma, which is about Martin Luther King and the campaign for voting rights for African Americans in 1965. In his acceptance speech, Legend made the point that inequality in the US is still a problem. He said, there are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850. Is that true? Well, let's start with the United States Census of 1850, which makes for uncomfortable reading, I have to say. Wesley Stevenson's been looking at the numbers with me. So, Wes, the total number of African American slaves was 3.2 million.
Yes, that's right, but not all of them were men, though. Almost one and a half million are children.
And that's almost half the total slave population, which is just shocking to me.
And another 870,000 of them were women.
But John Legend was making a claim about the number of men who were enslaved in 1850 versus the number of men who were under correctional control, as he puts it, in the US today.
Yeah, and the 1850 census shows there were almost 875,000 male slaves who were aged 15 or over.
Whereas today it's estimated that there are almost 2 million African-American men in either state or federal prisons, local jails, or on probation or parole, i.e. out of prison but under supervision. So John Legend's correct to say that there are more black men under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, just over twice as many.
But it's not exactly a fair comparison because that doesn't take into account population growth over the last 165 years.
Yeah, and there are many more African Americans living in the United States today, ten times as many. So when you take that into account, the picture does change.
In 1850, most African American men, almost 90%, were slaves.
Whereas today, about 10% of African American men are under correctional control.
So the picture's reversed.
Although 10% of black men under correctional control is still a sizeable number, looking at it another way, there are roughly six times more black men than white in a state or federal prison in America. John Legend also made another claim in his Oscars speech. He said that the US is the most incarcerated country in the world. Is he right about that? Well, there are 2.2 million prisoners in the US, which is more than in any other country. But of course, it's got a big population, so you'd expect it to have a lot. Well, yes, it's big, but it's no China. Well, that's true. China's population is four times bigger than the US's. And yet China's second in the list, with about 1.7 million prisoners, half a million fewer...
But experts suspect that there are more prisoners in China than official figures show. And the really important number to look at isn't total number of prisoners, but the prisoner rate.
The number of prisoners per 100,000 people in the general population.
And in the US, that number is very high. It's not at the top of the table. The Seychelles is, bizarrely, but that's a very small country, and experts say it's likely to be a blip. So the US is second place in terms of prisoner rate, with 707 prisoners per 100,000 people. Experts say that's five or six times higher than countries you'd expect it to be on a par with, like Canada and those in Western Europe. So why is that? Well, there's debate about exactly why. But experts point to a vigorous legal system, a high number of convictions and tough sentencing.
We must say thank you to Mark Maurer of the Sentencing Project in Washington for crunching those prisoner numbers for us this week. Now, if there are any numbers you'd like us to explore, do email us. Our address is more or less at bbc.co.uk. Now, Ruth, I saw that Lego has been celebrating a 15% rise in sales and profits because they were on the brink of collapse 15 years ago, apparently, so it's quite a comeback.
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