Jazz, Gender and Justice: Incarcerated

All the Sad Young Men

Introduction

Running time 4:50

All the Sad Young Men

Song

Running time 11:06

Music by Fran Lanesman and Tommy Wolf

Improv section by Stephanie Glass

Images: Faith Ringgold, Permission granted for show

This part of the show asks each of us to embrace one another as persons of worth, deserving of respect and assistance. With this as a premise, the intolerable incarceration of so many members of our communities, especially young men of color, is presented. The song All the Sad Young Men evokes the horror of the United States penal system which imprisons more people than any other country in the world.

Quoted from:

1 in 100 Adults Behind Bars in America 2008

The Pew Charitable Trusts February 2008

Three decades of growth in America’s prison population has quietly nudged the nation across a sobering threshold: for the first time, more than one in every 100 adults is now confined in an American jail or prison. According to figures gathered and analyzed by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project, the number of people behind bars in the United States continued to climb in 2007. . . For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling. While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine. . .Men still are roughly 10 times more likely to be in jail or prison, but the female population is burgeoning at a far brisker pace. For black women in their mid- to late-30s, the incarceration rate also has hit the 1-in-100 mark. Growing older, meanwhile, continues to have a dramatic, chilling effect on criminal behavior. While one in every 53 people in their 20s is behind bars, the rate for those over 55 falls to one in 837.

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, including the far more populous nation of China. At the start of the new year, [2008] the American penal system held more than 2.3 million adults. China was second, with 1.5 million people behind bars, and Russia was a distant third with 890,000 inmates. . . Beyond the sheer number of inmates, America also is the global leader in the rate at which it incarcerates its citizenry. . . In the U.S, the rate is roughly 750 per 100,000.