Native Americans were significantly over-represented in the states prison population. In Montana, where I lived and taught for four years. For the federal prison system, an overview can be found here. They exclude jails administered by federal, state prison, or tribal authorities,” you can read more here. For the Native American population incarcerated in “local jails,” which are defined as “confinement facilities administered by local or regional law enforcement agencies and private facilities operated under contract to such agencies. There is information on jails in Indian Country here. I had always assumed that Native Americans, in states with large Native American populations, were over-represented in those state prison populations. A student in my Indian Law class asked about incarceration rates for Native Americans. Professor Thompson was on campus, as were a number of people who had been involved in the Attica uprising and its aftermath. And many of our students read Heather Thompson’s book on Attica last fall. My good friend runs a blog detailing her experiences as the wife of an inmate incarcerated under New York’s inhumane Rockefeller drug laws.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the prison system. Racism is alive and well in this Incarceration Nation. Not only does the United States, with 5% of the world’s population, incarcerate nearly a quarter of the people on earth who live their lives behind bars, but it does so in a manner where African Americans are are disproportionately represented in the prison population. Many of my students have seen The 13th, the scathing documentary that looks at the close relationship between racism and violence in modern America.
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