A post in The Guardian about black imprisonment in Britain offers this shocking, headline-grabbing statistic. To quote,
Evidence of this damaged relationship can be found in the commission's report. On the streets, black people were subjected to what the report describes as an "excess" of 145,000 stop and searches in 2008. It notes that black people constitute less than 3% of the population, yet made up 15% of people stopped by police.
The commission found that five times more black people than white people per head of population in England and Wales are imprisoned. The ethnic minority prison population has doubled in a decade – from 11,332 in 1998 to 22,421 in 2008. Over a similar period, the overall number of prisoners rose by less than two thirds. The commission says that the total number of people behind bars accelerated in the last decade despite "a similar number of crimes being reported to the police as in the early 1990s … the volume of indictable offences has fallen over this time".
If you were willing to skip over the correction at the beginning of the article, this can lead someone to quickly conclude that "The United Kingdom incarcerates 75% more black people proportionally than the United States." What are we to make of that? What are we to make of
The Guardian's retraction?
