Largely obscured by the rancorous debate surrounding U.S. immigration policy is the emergence of a trend that should be a cause of concern to all Latino communities: the explosion of the number of Latinos in prison.With one-in-six Latino males born today expected to spend some time in prison during their lives, the future portends devastating consequences for Latino communities.
Too many Latino men are living in prison
RYAN S. KING and ANGELA MARIA ARBOLEDA
Racial Breakdown:
Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment
On December 31, 2005, there were 2,193,798 people in U.S. prisons and jails. The United States incarcerates a greater share of its population, 737 per 100,000 residents, than any other country on the planet. But when you break down the statistics you see that incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment.
U.S. incarceration rates by race, June 30, 2006:
* Whites: 409 per 100,000
* Latinos: 1,038 per 100,000
* Blacks: 2,468 per 100,000
Gender is an important "filter" on the who goes to prison or jail, June 30, 2006:
* Females: 134 per 100,000
* Males: 1,384 per 100,000
Look at just the males by race, and the incarceration rates become even more frightening, June 30, 2006:
* White males: 736 per 100,000
* Latino males: 1,862 per 100,000
* Black males: 4,789 per 100,000
If you look at males aged 25-29 and by race, you can see what is going on even clearer, June 30, 2006:
* For White males ages 25-29: 1,685 per 100,000.
* For Latino males ages 25-29: 3,912 per 100,000.
* For Black males ages 25-29: 11,695 per 100,000. (That's 11.7% of Black men in their late 20s.)
Or you can make some international comparisons:
South Africa under Apartheid was internationally condemned as a racist society.
* South Africa under apartheid (1993), Black males: 851 per 100,000
* U.S. under George Bush (2006), Black males: 4,789 per 100,000
What does it mean that the leader of the "free world" locks up its Black males at a rate 5.8 times higher than the most openly racist country in the world?
Statistics as of June 30, 2006 from Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006, Table 14. The "rates by race" statistics are calculated from the component parts of Table 14. South Africa figures from Marc Mauer, Americans Behind Bars: The International Use of Incarceration. All references to Blacks and Whites are for what the Bureau of Justice Statistics and U.S. Census refer to as "non-Hispanic Blacks" and "non-Hispanic Whites".)
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An Interactive Blog to Accompany the Book
Bookshelf
Book Description
The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (NYU Press, 2007) tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. This interactive blog continues some of the discussions initiated in the book and, in the process, expands the book’s obsessions by further interrogating national conceptions of Latina and Latino forms of personhood and how these have been written on the Latino body. (The book was published by NYU Press' Sexual Cultures Series.) Irreverent, polemical, visually provocative, and hopefully fun to peruse, the interactive blog is meant to persuade and influence conversations on and about the Latino body politic. Send related images, videos, art and text to me at lazlima@gmail.com. You can get the book directly from NYU Press and Amazon.
Book Blurbs
"Through a bricolage of carefully crafted textual readings, Lima has produced a text that traces the relationship between corporeality and citizenship by marking the process by which the Latino body has become historical. Situated in moments of national and bodily crisis, his archive is decidedly precise and imaginatively expansive, metaphorically rich and politically dynamic. Drawing on texts central to third world feminism, queer studies, and Latin and Latino American literatures, this work is as central to rethinking the American literary canon as it is to an invigorating remapping of Latino Studies."
—Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad
—Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad
"Lima's Latino Body promises to productively disrupt the business-as-usual of critical and scholarly practice in the still-emerging field of U.S. Latino studies; it will contribute directly to the next stage in the long process of what it itself terms Latino identity's 'becoming historical' in North American cultural, political, and intellectual contexts. For this reason alone, The Latino Body could not be more welcome, or more timely."
—Ricardo L. Ortíz, Georgetown University, author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America
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