Segregating Prisons

It's a fact of life in many Western countries, that the rise in ethnic immigrants has given rise to a disproportionate (in relation to their proportion of the population) number of the immigrant males in prison for long sentences.

White v Black in US Prisons - Nothing New

Now I am not a proponent of the notion that this is inherent racism, I actually believe that in the main they get more latitude than they should before going to prison (but that's another argument).

 

Furthermore that they often end up following criminal lifestyles because unfettered immigration and daft asylum rules, mean that they favour the arrival of large numbers of immigrant young men, who have little or no skills, are poorly educated (even by their own countries standards), and who often in the case of Islamists, find that they actually have a natural antipathy towards our culture. They or their children (who often reject the culture, or fail at school), then use crime as their lifestyle choice to 'make good', and that's why they end up in prison.

Among the general male British born prison population, 20% of them are from a minority ethnic group. And amongst the 13% (in March 2012) of the prison population who were classed 'foreign national prisoners', then 62% were from a minority ethnic group .... which means that 29% of the total male UK prison population is a member of a non-native European 'ethnic' minority.

However as mentioned already, this is not a problem in just the UK, the French and Germans also have similar issues (north African descent Muslims in France, and Turkish descent Muslims in Germany etc). In North America the problem was originally people of African descent, but it could be argued that there was an element of racism involved in the high prison numbers for Black Americans, as many were imprisoned in the southern states, where segregation and prejudice held sway. Nowadays though, the US prisons have large numbers of 'Latino's', in numbers far out of proportion to their representation in the general population.

 

However all this gives rise to another problem, one that may end up bringing the penal system to its knees .... race gangs. In the UK's prisons there were some Jamaican 'Yardie' gangs, and even some East European gangs operating, but the largest and fastest growing of the gangs is the jihadist south Asian descent gangs. They are bringing some UK prisons to the point of not being able to operate properly, and its an issue we can't ignore for much longer ... this causes the UK and US prisons in particular to be powder-kegs of simmering racial tensions. In the US the ethnic minority gangs now include the white 'Aryan Brotherhood' and a splinter group 'Aryan Brotherhood Texas' (who recently killed three US law enforcement officials in 3 months), amongst the growing numbers of gangs operating inside the prison system.

Aryan Brotherhood Gangs In and Outside US Prisons

What drew me to this issue was the reported fact that up until as late as the late 1970's, many US prisons were racially segregated (either inside, or in completely separate establishments for the different races), and the fact there has been a dramatic rise in the incidents of inter ethnic violence since they were desegregated, which has not only made the system nearly collapse, but has driven ethnic gang membership inside the prisons to record levels .... in other words, completely the opposite effect that desegregation of the system was meant to achieve.

Maybe its about time that the liberals admitted to yet another mistake, and accept that segregation on racial or ethnic lines in prisons, is probably the only way we can get the prisons to work again, and also the only way to halt the ghettoisation of the inmates becoming 100% of all racial groups.

NB: Actor images used to portray stereo types.