More Black men are incarcerated in Wisconsin than any other state
Black Blue Dog
While Wisconsin is known for its famous football team, Green Bay, and its cheese, it is also known as the state that locks up more Black men in the U.S. than any other state. While the national average of Black men that are incarcerated is 6.7 percent, Wisconsin has a whopping 13 percent, or 1 out of every 8 Black men in their state behind bars.
According to census figures, African Americans make up 6.5 percent of the state’s population. A mass majority of the state’s Black male incarceration population stems from Milwaukee. According to the researchers, more than half of all Black men in their 30s and 40s had been incarcerated at some point. The mass incarceration of African American men in Milwaukee equates to a mass population of people who are unemployable, which contributes to the city’s poverty — making it one of the poorest big cities in the nation.
The city’s felons are concentrated in the same neighborhoods: The study also found that almost two-thirds of Milwaukee County’s incarcerated Black men come from the city’s six poorest ZIP codes. “I do think that a lot of it has to do with sentencing policy,” said Jeanne Geraci, who runs the Benedict Center, a Milwaukee-based organization that advocates for community-based responses to criminal justice. Geraci said that the state has a much more aggressive stance to incarceration; Minnesota, which has similar demographics and crime rates, has a prison population half the size of Wisconsin’s prison population.
