ecades, as millions of blacks moved out of the rural South into cities, their share of U.S. prison rolls swelled from one quarter to almost half, while the black proportion of the general population only moved from 10 to 12 percent. Among the reasons cited for this are joblessness, family disintegration, and an inner city youth culture in which drug runners are glorified as successful entrepreneurs. Additionally, there is a suspicion that a white run justice system magnifies the problem by willfully discriminating against blacks, though researchers deny that this is true in reality. There is evidence that black murderers tend to be executed more often if their victims are white, but a new Rand Corporation study of California cases finds no evidence of racial discrimination in prison terms meted out to offenders. However, it can be shown that formulas using guidelines for judges to give standardized sentences have had the unintended consequence of putting more blacks into prison because blacks tend to score worse on such factors as unemployment, drug use and juvenile arrests ("A bleak indictment of the inner city" 14).
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