The New Color Line: Prisons and Race

Free beats slavery but the system never let go. America just swapped chains for cells

and nobody saw it coming. Slavery built the South with cotton. Jim Crow kept blacks

locked in sharecropping after freedom came. The North offered escape but cities built ghettos instead.

Each system kept black labor trapped and separated. Then came mass incarceration. When ghettos crumbled

in the sixties, prisons exploded. The numbers prove it. Black inmates went

from thirty percent to seventy percent in fifty years. One in three black men now face prison

time versus one in twenty white men. Arrest rates stayed flat but prison

rates for blacks soared eight times higher. This isn't about crime.