In black and white

A recent infographic from the arrestrecords site shows the persistence of racism in the US Criminal Justice system.

As you can see below, African Americans are three times more likely to be in prison compared to their white counterparts (based on the overall make-up of the population) and even more likely to be on death row.

The infographic contains a number of extremely worrying facts such as blacks who killed whites were sentenced to death 22 times more frequently than blacks who killed blacks and 7 times more frequently than whites who killed blacks.

There’s a flicker of hope at the bottom of the infographic which notes that although equality is a long way off, there is a growing trend towards racial parity in sentencing and incarceration.