Racial inequality is an American tradition. Relative to whites, blacks earn twenty-four percent less, live five fewer years, and are six times more likely to be incarcerated on a given day. Hispanics earn twenty-five percent less than whites and are three times more likely to incarcerated.1 At the end of the 1990s, there were one-third more black men under the jurisdiction of the corrections system than there were enrolled in colleges or universities (Ziedenberg and Schiraldi,