The thing that stuck with me the most from this past discussion was how the Pew Foundation published 1 in 100 in order to bring attention to mass incarceration in the United States. As we discussed, the title come from the fact that 1 in 100 people in the United States are in prison or jail. What is stunning is that they could have picked even more potent numbers. They didn’t include people who are under penal supervision outside of confinement (parole or probation), and they could have chosen certain groups of people to make the number even lower.
My question is whether choosing a different static with which to title the book would have been more or less effective. I imagine that they chose 1 in 100 because it encompasses the entirety of the population regardless or race, sex, or other differentiators. Including the entire population could serve to get everyone behind the cause it is evidently affecting everyone in the US, and people are definitely more likely to react if they can see that it is affecting people like themselves. However, they could have picked a more dramatic number such as the 1 in 9 black males in their 20s and early thirties that are currently in jail or prison. I’m not sure this number would have gotten the same widespread media attention that book received under its actual title. It could have not come across as groundbreaking since young, black men are often viewed as criminals, so the media would not have made nearly as big a deal about it. Contrarily, it could have also been even more publicized because it puts the insane disproportion of racialized incarceration into a single statistic. We’ll never know, but it is something interesting to ponder.
I think it’s really telling that “1 in 100” was the chosen title, when the number “1 in 9” should be so shocking (but is not). To me, the decision seems comparable to the tendency of many scholars, politicians, and others to refer to “mass incarceration” rather than “racialized mass incarceration,” in order to engender universal concern about a system that disproportionately targets the young black male population. Even if popular discourse reflects concern about the outsized effects on young black men, many choose to play into existing stereotypes about an epidemic of drugs and violence prominent in black communities, rather than attributing the problem (at least in part) to a “racialized” penal system.
Sorry, this is a late response! I agree with what you said though. I think that the reluctance to call the phenomenon “racialized mass incarceration” and the fact that they called the book “1 in 100” are symptoms of the same.