Here are some figures that may surprise you:
6
"Black men were more than six times as likely as white men in 2010 to be incarcerated in federal and state prisons, and local jails" according to a Pew Research Center report issued last September. The incarceration rate for black men in 2010 was 4,347 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents. And for white men, the rate was 678 per 100,000 U.S. residents. (For some historical context, Pew notes that in 1960, black men were five times as likely as white men to be sent to prison.)
41.7 %
At the end of 2011, that was the percentage of death row inmates who were black, according to the . "The race and sex of inmates under sentence of death has remained relatively unchanged since 2000," Tracy Snell, a statistician for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, wrote in a report from July 2013.
And here's another figure:
13.1 %
That's the percentage of the country's population that's black, from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Also notable, says Richard Deiter who heads the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonpartisan research organization, is that men account for . That's 1325 inmates of the 1338 executed.
