Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, discussed Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling, done in collaboration with artist Sabrina Jones, with Shawn Hamilton of New Books in Public Policy.com.  The book has become the essential text for understanding the exponential growth of the U.S. prison system.  Michelle Alexander, author of the bestselling The New Jim Crow, calls it "utterly indispensable."  Listen here.

Sesame Street is tackling incarceration with an educational kit entitled “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration."  The package, which consists of stories, tips and activities for caregivers and kids, is designed to act as “an educational outreach initiative for families with children (ages 3 – 8) who are coping with a parent’s incarceration.”

Despite a decline in the rates of incarceration, especially for women, one in every 50 children in the U.S. has a parent who is incarcerated, according to a report and fact sheet from The Sentencing Project.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, joined other experts in a conversation with Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, to discuss the Obama Administration’s plans to support innovative alternatives to incarceration and policies that reduce drug use and its consequences.

View here.

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.

Over the past decade, there has been a noticeable change in the prison population.

A smaller percentage of black women are being incarcerated, and that decrease is almost matched by the increase of white women who are going to prison.

That’s one of the most striking findings from a new report by The Sentencing Project, a non profit in Washington, D.C.

“What we saw in the first decade of the 21st century was a dramatic shift in the racial composition of prison populations,” Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, told Here & Now. “For the first time in nearly 40 years, we saw a sharp decline in the number of African Americans in prison – particularly women. We saw a steep rise in the number of white women going to prison, and among Hispanics we saw we saw a rise among women and a slight decline among men.