QUANTATIVE DESIGN RESEARCH

High Incarceration Rate of African American Males

High Incarceration Rate of African American Males

ABSTRACT

Prior research suggests that factors other than poverty and rates of high-risk behavior account for the disproportionate rates of STDs among African American adolescents. These factors may include the presence of high-risk adults who act as bridges of infection to youth sexual networks. Incarceration has been correlated with risk of STDs in youth and adults. The purpose of the Bayview Network Study was to describe the association between the characteristics of adolescents' social and sexual networks and the incidence and prevalence of STDs in a household sample of African American youth and their social friends and sex partners over a 12-month period. The data presented here are descriptive data regarding the demographics, incarceration rates, marginal economic activities, and sexual risk behaviors of the baseline cohort.

INTRODUCTION

The United States (US) is known to have the largest prison population of any developed nation. The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that the American prison population exceeded 2 million inmates for the first time in history on June 30, 2002. At that time, America's jails held 1 in every 142 US residents. By gender, the incarceration rate was 1,309 inmates per 100,000 US men, compared with 113 per 100,000 women. Reportedly, the number of additional jail inmates grew faster than the number of new jail beds during the 12 months preceding June 30, 2002.

Significant racial disparities in incarceration rates in the US have been demonstrated. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that in 1991 an African-American male had a 29% lifetime chance of serving at least 1 year in prison, six times higher than the rate for white males in the US [1]. In 1999, 9% of African-American males aged 25 to 29 were in prison. By contrast, only 1% of white males in the same age group were in prison that same year . More than one-third of young, African-American male high school dropouts were in prison or jail in the late 1990s according to one estimate, more than were employed [3].

In recent years sexually transmitted diseases (STD) research has focused increasing attention on the role of sexual networks. African Americans and whites appear to have separate sexual networks, and profound differences exist between blacks and whites in the nature of networks that link sexual interactions among individuals in these populations [8.]. One important difference in networks may be the extent of participation in concurrent sexual partnerships (partnerships that overlap in time). Among the 10,847 women respondents in the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), African Americans reported a substantially higher prevalence of concurrent partnerships (21%) than the rest of the population (12%). Other researchers have reported still higher concurrency prevalence (35%) in the subset of African American women in the 1995 NSFG with multiple partners [9.]. As part of the UNC Rural Health Project, a population-based study to determine risk factors for heterosexual HIV transmission among African American men and women in the rural South, we investigated ...