BLACK PR WIRE
February 2012
Miami, FL – After completing the first week of their 100-day, 1,000-mile trek, the explorers of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition will meet up with the members of Marshall Foundation’s River of Grass Canoe Expedition to share stories and experiences from paddling through the Everglades.
The meet-up between the two expedition teams will take place at a campsite on the Tamiami Trail on Tuesday, January 24, 2012. Following the meet-up, the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition team will continue its 100-day, 1,000 mile trek from the Everglades to the Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia.
The two expeditions started at different locations - the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition in Flamingo and the River of Grass Expedition at the Loxahatchee Wildlife Refuge – but share the same passion to provide the public with an inside look at Florida’s land, wildlife and waters.
Prison Population Exceeds Two Million
February 2012
According to a Justice Department report released in July 2003, the U.S. prison population surpassed 2 million for the first time—2,166,260 people were incarcerated in prisons or jails at the end of 2002 (the latest statistics available). Since 1990, the U.S. prison population, already the world's largest, has almost doubled.
About two-thirds of prisoners were in state and federal prisons, while the rest were in local jails. The report does not count all juvenile offenders, but noted that there were more than 10,000 inmates under age 18 held in adult prisons and jails in 2002. The number of women in federal and state prisons reached 97,491.
About 10.4% of the entire African-American male population in the United States aged 25 to 29 was incarcerated, by far the largest racial or ethnic group—by comparison, 2.4% of Hispanic men and 1.2% of white men in that same age group were incarcerated. According to a report by the Justice Policy Institute in 2002, the number of black men in prison has grown to five times the rate it was twenty years ago. Today, more African-American men are in jail than in college. In 2000 there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college. In 1980, there were 143,000 black men in prison and 463,700 enrolled in college.
