First published in 1999, Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate, a seminal work which explains the exponential growth of the U.S. prison system, has just been published as Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling.

Mauer collaborated with graphic artist Sabrina Jones to adapt and update the original text to produce a vivid and engaging comics narrative that chronicles four decades of prison expansion and its corrosive effect on generations of Americans and the implications for American democracy.

As Congress prepares spending bills for the next year, The Sentencing Project called on the panel overseeing justice funding to invest in our nation's young people by providing robust funding for juvenile justice and programs to prevent crime. 

Such funding would help protect children from adult jails, provide judges with options for age-appropriate sanctions, address the needs of girls, and reduce racial disparities in juvenile justice.

An Arizona Quaker group that has been advocating against prison privatization in the state is organizing a demonstration and press conference today, protesting the Corrections Corporation of America on its 30th anniversary.

Organizers of the rallies are protesting for-profit prisons around the country like CCA, because of problems including prisoner abuse, cost overruns, staffing problems, lawsuits, and violence.

The event features Grassroots Leadership's Kymberlie Quong Charles; Nicole Porter of The Sentencing Project; Isabel Garcia, Pima County Legal Defender and member of Derechos Humanos; and Alma Hernandez, a member of Fuerza! and Corazón de Tucson.

At the 2011 Princeton University conference "The Imprisonment of a Race," Danielle Pingue learned that nearly half of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States are African Americans. The statistic startled the Princeton sophomore, igniting an interest in the criminal justice system that would later help define her senior thesis topic.

The conference “sparked something in me to research more," Pingue said.

Pingue spent a day with conference panelist, Marc Mauer, founder and executive director of The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C.  She learned how policymakers and legislators use the nonprofit's research.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, discusses the racial disparity of convictions between black and white men in Wisconsin.  Listen here.

Reporter Daniel Denvir writes that “Expanded background checks may have been defeated last month in the Senate, but one area of bipartisan gun-control consensus is gathering steam in American cities: tougher sentences, including mandatory minimums, for illegal firearm possession.

Denvir continues that politicians know the policies “are ineffective but continue to vote for them lest they be painted as soft on crime. Indeed, research demonstrates that mandatory minimums create unequal and sometimes unjust sentences. They have also helped make the United States the most incarcerated nation on earth.

Legislation: Racial Impact Statement Legislation Advances
Federal Safety Valve Act
Research: Race Disparity in Marijuana Charges
Disproportionate Incarceration of Latino Youth
More Black Men in College than in Prison?
Policy: Interrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, was interviewed by Mark Karlin of Truth-out.org in a wide-ranging conversation about how the United States became the world leader in incarceration and Mauer’s new book: "Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling." 

The conversation ranged from how people who are incarcerated had become “commodities,” the connection between incarceration the drug war and race, the role of the rapidly emerging for-profit prison industry in "filling beds," and how substantial funds spent on incarceration could be redirected to the communities most heavily affected by mass incarceration.

Statistics from The Sentencing Project reveal that Massachusetts incarcerates Hispanics at the fourth highest rate in the country.

According to data from the organization, Massachusetts imprisons Hispanic individuals at a rate of 1,229 per 100,000 residents – a ratio of six to one when compared to the rate at which whites are imprisoned. Nationally, this figure is 1.8-to-one.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, said that many things come into play when deciphering these statistics, but the most significant have been policies from the “war on drugs” which sent U.S. incarceration rates skyrocketing over the past 30 years.

“Murphy’s Law” at UrbanMilwaukee.com covers a new report by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment & Training Institute (ETI) that found that more than half of all African American males in their 30s and 40s in Milwaukee County have served time in state prisons.

“The numbers are truly shocking,” says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project.

No state comes close to Wisconsin in imprisoning black males. The study found that 12.8 percent, or 1 in 8 of African American working age men, were incarcerated. That rate is 32 percent higher than the second worst state, Oklahoma, and nearly double the national average of 6.7 percent (or 1 in 15).