Prison Industrial Complex

The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is important in the lives of African Americans because it directly impacts a large portion of the African American community. In California, as of 1998, 80% percent of those in prison were African Americans (Schlosser, 1998). In the 1970s, there were only 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people in the general population. By the 1990s, however, that figure had risen to 445 per 100,000, or 1,100 per 100,000 when only counting adult men. Most of those people are African American. In fact, when looking at the general population vs. the prison population, in California, African Americans make up 6.8% of the general population, while they make up 31.6% of the prison population ("California's Expanding Prison-Industrial Complex," 2005). In addition, many prisoners are also illiterate or suffer from serious mental illness. It appears as if the prison system, especially in California, has "become a revolving door for poor, highly dysfunctional, and often illiterate drug abusers" (Schlosser, 1998, p. 52). In fact, of the top ten reasons people are sent to prison, only two of those reasons are for violent crimes. The rest are non-violent crimes (Schlosser, 1998). When analyzing these facts, it becomes apparent that the PIC is a form of institutionalized racism and a way of keeping the African American population from experiencing its full potential.

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which is part of a larger community, all at one with nature, the earth, and the cosmos. In striving to live in cooperation with the cosmos, the person living according to Ma'at is living a very different life from the Western point of view, which is to conquer the cosmos (The Ma'at, 2005). References "Ma'at." (2005). Ancient Egypt: The Mythologx. Accessed online at: http://www.egyptianmyths.net/maat.htm "The Ma'at." (2005). Centers for New Horizons. Accessed online at: http://cnh.org/ma'at.htm. 5.What is analysis and why is it important? According to YourDictionary.com, the term analysis means to break something down to its individual parts for study, and then to examine how these parts fit together to make a whole. In other words, it is a close, systematic study of a subject or person to figure out what makes it work and how it is put together (YourDictionary.com, 2005). This term is often applied in many fields such as science, psychology, sociology, literature, linguistics, and even information systems and computers. In the case of this class, analysis means an examination of the African American society by closely examining the different parts and how they make up the whole. This means studying African
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Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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