"Women made up 7 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons last year and accounted for nearly one in four arrests, the government reported Sunday.

The number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons in 2004 was up 4 percent compared with 2003, more than double the 1.8 percent increase among men, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported. In 1995, women made up 6.1 percent of inmates in those facilities.

The total number of people incarcerated grew 1.9 percent in 2004 to 2,267,787."

(Source: The Associated Press, "Number of Women in Prisons Is on Rise" in The New York Times, October 24, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/national/24prison.html?th&emc=th.)

"Unless we maintain correctional institutions of such character that they create respect for law and government instead of breeding resentment and a desire for revenge, we are meeting lawlessness with stupidity and making a travesty of justice."

(Source: Mary B. Harris, I Knew Them in Prison, ch. 34, 1936; quoted in Andrews, Robert; Biggs, Mary; and Seidel, Michael, et al, eds., The Columbia World of Quotations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996; http://www.bartleby.com/66/74/26874.html.)

Have the dramatic gains of women in the workplace, heralded by the media every time new statistics are released, come at the expense of black males, the original focus of the 1964 Civil Rights Act?

While the Census Bureau does not break down the job numbers on African-Americans by sex (a helpful figure which would provide irrefutable evidence), the Bureau has reported greater employment gains among women and whites than among men and blacks since 1970. The percentage of women in the workplace jumped from 41 percent in 1970 to 57 percent in 2001, while the percentage of men actually declined from 76 percent to 71 percent. Also, the percentage of whites in the workforce increased from 58 percent to 65 percent during the same period; among blacks, from 55 to 60 percent.

As these figures suggest that black males have made little, if any, employment gains since 1970, a study by Becky Pettit of the University of Washington and Bruce Western of Princeton University documents another troubling, and perhaps related trend: A dramatic increase of minority young men in the prison population, the total of which has increased six-fold since 1972.

The researchers culled data from several sources, including the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and the Survey of Inmates of States and Federal Correctional Facilities (1974-1999). They calculate that by 1999, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks born between 1965 and 1999 had served time in prison by their early thirties. Among black men in this cohort, 30 percent of those without a college education had been in prison; among black male high school dropouts, the percentage is 60 percent. While these risks are about 6 to 8 percent higher for blacks than for whites (a pattern that has not changed in 20 years), they are three times higher than 20 years ago.

"Imprisonment now rivals or overshadows the frequency of military service and college graduation for recent cohorts of African-American men. For black men in their mid-thirties at the end of the 1990s, prison records were nearly twice as common as bachelor's degrees ... and twice as common as military service."

Although they do not ponder how the feminization of the workforce enters the equation, Pettit and Western nonetheless write that "declining wages among non-college men over the last 20 years may underlie the growing risk of imprisonment."