Study Settles It: Shocking Black & Latino Imprisonment Rates the Result of Racist, Punitive Impulse  http://www.alternet.org/story/146550/study_settles_it%3A_shocking_black_%26_latino_imprisonment_rates_the_result_of_racist%2C_punitive_impulse

For decades, journalists, scholars and activists seeking to understand the soaring number of people locked up in U.S. prisons over the past 40 years have uncovered -- or just looked clearly enough to see -- overwhelming evidence of systemic racism at every level of the criminal justice system. Yet, there has been a wide reluctance to name racism as one of the primary factors fueling the prison boom; as sentences have gotten longer and parole granted less often, even the starkest racial statistics --

like the fact that African Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population -- have often been treated as an unfortunate byproduct of the war on drugs.Now, two criminologists have concluded, in a new study investigating public attitudes behind harsh sentencing, that the warehousing of African Americans and other minorities is no accident. Rather, "racial resentments are inextricably entwined in public punitiveness." In other words, racism and the rise of "tough on crime" policies go hand in hand.