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I became inspired by this fact from The Sentencing Project,
The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation’s prisons and jails, a 500% increase over the last forty years.
I wanted to research the affects of mass incarceration on African Americans and I found these statistics from The Bureau of Justice Statistics and The Sentencing Project,
More than 60% of the people in prison today are people of color. The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for men is 1 in 9. The likelihood for black men is 1 in 3 while the likelihood for white men is 1 in 17.
I decided it was critical to create a visual timeline analyzing the increasing rates of African American imprisonment. From this research and illustration, one can see that while the fashions may change, the targeted skin color of mass incarceration doesn't. Since I am an African American designer, it is important that I use my profession as a medium to educate the public about our culture.