Title: Criminal stereotype of African Americans - Wikipedia
Headings: Criminal stereotype of African Americans
Criminal stereotype of African Americans
Contents
Statistics
Incarceration for drug related crimes
Female jail time
Statistics and self-reporting
History
Perceptions
Perpetuation of negative images by popular culture
Police killing black males
Consequences
Consequences in the justice system
Social consequences
Health consequences
Situation in other countries
See also
References
Sources

Content: As of 1995, one in fourteen adult black males was incarcerated in prison or jail on any given day, representing a doubling of this rate from 1985. Furthermore, a black male born in 1991 has a 29 percent chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life. A study found that in 1979, 80% of the racial disparity in prison populations was accounted for by African Americans committing more crime, but by 2008, another study by Michael Tonry and Matthew Melewski found that this percentage had decreased to 61%. To put these figures in context, "legally relevant considerations account for by far the largest share of variation in sentences among defendants," and the remaining residual gap is due largely to variables such as prior record and access to private counsel, rather than plain racism. Incarceration for drug related crimes
For drug related offenses, from 1965 through the early 1980s, African Americans were approximately twice as likely as whites to be arrested. However, with the War on Drugs in the 1970s, African American arrest rates skyrocketed, while white arrest rates increased only slightly. By the end of the 1980s, African Americans were more than five times more likely than whites to be arrested for drug-related offenses. In 1993, criminologist Alfred Blumstein argued that as national self-report data showed that drug use was actually declining among both African Americans and Whites, it is highly unlikely that these race differences in arrest rates represent "real" patterns of drug use. Instead these crime statistics reflect the government's targeting of only specific types of drug use and trafficking. Although the "black drug user" stereotype is heavily associated with young African Americans, a 2011 survey using self-reported data found African American young people less likely to use illegal drugs than other racial groups in the U.S. According to Michelle Alexander, the disproportionate mass incarceration of African Americans in drug-related offenses is caused by racial bias within the criminal justice system, terming this phenomenon as " The New Jim Crow ", in a book of the same name.