A map called "Architecture and Justice" was one of the most chilling displays at MOMA's Design and the Elastic Mind show a few years ago. One could watch in real time as a red dot--representing a person--was swept from one of New York City's poorer boroughs and "landed" in an upstate prison.
Part of the mapping project is called "Million Dollar Blocks," because annual imprisonment costs of some city blocks exceed $1 million. In those places, "on a financial scale, prisons are becoming the predominant governing institution in the neighborhood." Certainly the 14,000 residents of Brownsville, Brooklyn may feel that way, enjoying about 6,000 police stops a year for "furtive movement" or "other" unspecified behavior. As the NYT reports, "in each of those encounters, officers logged the names of those stopped — whether they were arrested or not — into a police database." And there are many crimes to solve---as Sen. Jim Webb has noted, "With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses nearly 25% of the world's reported prisoners."
There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers. If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status.