Shifting Prison Populations

According to a recent Baltimore Sun article, in 2000, black men were incarcerated at nearly eight times the rate of white men, while black women were nearly three times more likely to be imprisoned than white women.

Based on class discussions about Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, the incarceration statistics about black men should come as no surprise. During class we learned that America's criminal justice system is perpetuating racial discrimination, and ultimately creating a new, invisible racial caste system in our country (p. 16). 

In a recent Baltimore Sun article, however, a new survey conducted by the Sentencing Project--a Washington-based prison research and advocacy group--concluded that the incarceration rates among black men were falling in Maryland.  

That is, "figures from the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services show that the percentage of African-American inmates in Maryland prisons dropped from 77.8 percent in 2000 to 74.7 percent a decade later, even though the share of blacks in the overall population increased during that time" (Baltimore Sun). The article also reads: 

Beginning in the 1980s, states began adopting harsh mandatory sentencing guidelines for drug possession that resulted in the imprisonment of thousands of African-Americans for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses. The violence associated with the crack epidemic, in particular, led lawmakers to make the penalties for possession of even small amounts crack equivalent to those for much larger quantities of powder cocaine, which was more often used by whites. The net effect was an explosion in the black prison population that exacerbated the racial disparities already in the system.

According to Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, no single factor could explain the shifting figures but that changes in drug laws and sentencing for drug offenses probably played a large role (New York Times).

Mauer’s comment, then, aligns with Alexander’s recognition of how the mass incarceration system “works." Precisely, Alexander writes that the War on Drugs is the vehicle through which extraordinary numbers of black men are forced into a cage (p. 185). 

In sum then, I ask: what are we to make of this? Why the shift, and why the change? Do you think this is more about the population decline in blacks in Marlyand? Or is this intuitive of the change in drug laws?