Latino/a and Hispanic

Kathleen Pequeño spoke with Angela Arboleda, Associate Director for Criminal Justice Policy with the National Council of La Raza, about over-representation of Latinos in prison, jail, and immigrant detention thanks to “incarceration fever.” NCLR is the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, and Angela spoke with us by phone from Washington, DC.

Cassandra Villanueva left Partnership for Safety and Justice in late 2005 to join the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States. As the coordinator of NCLR’s Latino Juvenile Justice Network, she works on reducing racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. She sat down with Justice Matters’ editor Kathleen Pequeño to talk about disparities and Latino youth.

If you’re reading this in Oregon, where three out of four people in prison are white, you may be wondering why devoted a whole issue of Justice Matters to racial disparity. It’s because racial disparity -- the differences that lead to people of color being punished more than their white counterparts for doing the same thing -- is just as bad here as it is in the rest of the country. Racial disparity is unfair, unjust, and ultimately harmful to everyone in Oregon. We can’t possibly address the problems of our criminal justice system without taking on racial disparities.

Prisoners of a Hard Life, the latest comic book from the Real Cost of Prisons Project is now available on the web. Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women & Their Children packs solid information and compelling stories into sixteen graphic pages.

On December 31, 2001, there were 1,955,705 people in U.S. prisons and jails. As of December 31, 2001, the U.S. incarceration rate was 709 per 100,000 residents (7 out of every 1,000 Americans). But when you break down the statistics you see that incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment.