The Color of American Justice

Aidsand Wright-Riggins, Executive Director of National Ministries of the American Baptist Churches, has issued a challenge for New Covenant Baptists to examine the statistics on the ethnicity of the people incarcerated in American prisons in light of the Nazareth Manifesto (Luke 4:18-19). Here's a quote from his appeal:

I realized that I personally know more young African-American men who have been imprisoned than those who are members of college fraternities. An entire lucrative industry has grown up around the incarceration of African American men.

Some two million United States citizens are now in federal and state prisons, and the vast majority of these prisoners are nonwhite. Mother Jones' exhaustive analysis of U.S. incarceration rates shows a locked-down nation--with African-Americans, who make up only 13 percent of the general population, comprising an extremely disproportionate number of prisoners.