Gravel Doubles Prison Statistic

01 July 2007

At the Democratic debate this week, Mike Gravel made the following claim:

"In 1972, we had 179,000 human beings in jail in this country; today, it’s 2.3 million, and 70 percent are black, African Americans."
While it is true that 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated, Mike got the 70% figure way wrong. It's actually 40%, according to the Department of Justice. That's still disproportionate to the nation's African American population, but way off the mark from what Gravel said.

If only the debates had one of these:

No comments: