Ending Mass Incarceration – A Critical Human Rights, Civil Rights and Racial Justice Battle The US has 5% of the world population and 25% of the world's prisoners. On any given day, there are over 7 million people in our prisons and jails, on probation or parole. We lock up more people for longer periods of time than any other industrialized country in the world.The brunt of this policy is borne by African-Americans and Latinos. Blacks make up 13% of the US population and over 50% of its prisoners. They are incarcerated at a rate 8 times higher than that of whites. As Michelle Alexander in her best-selling book, The New Jim Crow, has pointed out, once you're labelled a felon, you're trapped in a permanent second-class status in which you may be denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. Our guests are both professionals in the field and activists campaigning to dismantle the prison-industrial complex and fundamentally alter the conversation about crime and punishment. They are: Fernando M Perez, PhD. Barry University Department of Sociology & CriminologyAudrey Bomse, National Lawyers Guild, former Public Defender
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