Academic literature on the topic 'Black male inmates'

This essay discusses changes in the composition of inmate populations in the United States over the past several decades based on legal factors (i.e., types of offenses and offenders) and demographic variables (i.e., race, ethnicity, age, and sex) and examines why variation in inmate composition matters. In particular, black incarceration rates are substantially greater than those of whites and Hispanics, and over time these differences have become more pronounced for black males in particular as compared to other groups. Possible reasons for these changes are considered such as the roles of p

The sixth chapter spans the decades between the 1920s and the 1960s. In these years, as Los Angeles took center stage in the nation’s landscape of jails and prisons, the population of African Americans incarcerated in Los Angeles shot from politically irrelevant and slightly disproportionate to politically dominant and stunningly disproportionate. It has remained so ever since. Chapter 6 tracks the origins of the incarceration of blacks in Los Angeles. In particular, it details why and how black incarceration so disproportionately followed the expansion of L.A.’s African American community. Moreover, by exhuming the first recorded killing of a young black male by the LA PD, which occurred in South Central Los Angeles on the evening of April 24, 1927, this chapter details why and how police brutality so closely accompanied black incarceration in the city. It is a brutal history attended by persistent—and, in time, explosive—black protest, tracking how community members fought police brutality between 1927 and the outbreak of the Watts Rebellion in 1965. Indeed, race, policing, and protest became inextricable as Los Angeles advanced toward becoming the carceral capital of the United States.

This chapter examines the case of Joan Little, a North Carolinian inmate who defended herself against sexual assault by her white jailer and was subsequently put on trial for murder in 1975. Little found avid support from the black freedom, women’s liberation, and prisoner’s rights movements, all of which employed varying frameworks to theorize Little’s plight. The confluence of multiple political agendas around this single case reveals the many ways that activists defined the injustices of rape. The dominant racial justice discourse focused on Little’s vulnerability as a black woman, attacked by both a white man and then a white supremacist legal system. From the prisoner’s rights perspective, the defining issue was Little’s status as an incarcerated woman. Her case revealed the violence and oppression of the legal system as a whole. Finally for feminists, Little epitomized the situation faced by all women, first victimized by men and then a male-dominated legal system that refused to grant her her right to self-defense. Although not in conflict with one another, these varying interpretations reveal what motivated activists to respond to rape and when and why activists deemed rape a political issue.

This chapter focuses on elite prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, where block elders and other elite prisoners appropriated clothing and personal goods stolen from other inmates to instantiate their social status in the camp. Differences among prisoners existed and were integral to the Nazi socio-racial planning and running of the camp. To survive, prisoners had to “make a career,” that is, to achieve success in the terms of the camp. Using survivor accounts, the chapter then explores the ways in which fashion and dress manifested in a social world on the precipice of immediate death. Even though it developed autonomously, prisoner fashion was ultimately one of the tools with which the SS created a “ruling class” of prisoners who acted in their stead. It was the prisoner elite that reflected these negative ideals and values into the depths of the camp, from which the SS tried to keep a healthy distance.