Informant38

The societal implications are profound:

When every wild thing your Dad predicted has already come true, what do you do for a challenge?
If you're Zack Lynch, you look for the next technology poised to take off like a rocket.
Lynch, 35, is betting that brain scientists will unleash the next waves of world-transforming discoveries. Since 2001, he has founded a flock of enterprises to track and accelerate the field of neurotechnology, which develops drugs and tools that influence the brain and nervous system. His ventures include conferences, neurotech investment analyses and a fledgling trade association.

Tansey/SFGate 29.May.07
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The disproportionate representation of black Americans in the U.S. criminal justice system is well documented. Blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but 30 percent of people arrested, 41 percent of people in jail, and 49 percent of those in prison. Nine percent of all black adults are under some form of correctional supervision (in jail or prison, on probation or parole), compared to two percent of white adults. One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was either in jail or prison, or on parole or probation in 1995. One in ten black men in their twenties and early thirties is in prison or jail. Thirteen percent of the black adult male population has lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws.

HRW
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African Americans represent 13 percent of the U.S. population but 44 percent of those incarcerated, Shaw said. In 2000, one of every nine young black males was imprisoned, compared with three of 200 young white men. There is a nearly three-fifths chance that a black male high school dropout born between 1965 and 1969 will have gone to prison or jail at least once before turning 35. In the United States, two-thirds of inmates are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, mostly for dealing drugs.

Trei/Stanford
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The hammer of incarceration for drug offenses has by no means fallen equally across race or age categories, with young, African American men suffering unprecedented rates of incarceration for drug offenses. According to the Sentencing Project, nearly one in three (32%) black men between the ages of 20 and 29 were under criminal justice control in 1995.11 A recent report by the Building Blocks for Youth Initiative found that black youth were admitted to state public facilities for drug offenses at 48 times the rate of white youth.12

From 1986 to 1991, while the number of blacks imprisoned for violent offenses rose by about the same amount as whites (31,000 and 33,000, respectively), the number of blacks imprisoned for drug offenses increased four times as much as the increase for whites (66,000 vs. 15,000).13 This occurred at a time when survey data showed that five times as many whites were using drugs as blacks.14 The consequences of mass incarceration affect individuals and whole communities. The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch has reported that by 1998, 1.4 million African America men, or 13% of the black male adult population, had lost the right to vote due to their involvement in the criminal justice system.15

More recently, Human Rights Watch released a report focusing on the extent to which African Americans "have been burdened with imprisonment because of nonviolent drug offenses." The findings of the report were sobering:

• While blacks make up about 13% of regular drug users in the US, they make up 62.7% of all drug offenders admitted to prison.
• While there are 5 times as many white drug users as black drug users, black men are admitted to state prison for drug offenses at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. This drives an overall black incarceration rate that is 8.2 times higher than the white incarceration rate.
• In seven states, blacks constitute 80 to 90% of all drug offenders sent to prison. In 15 states, black men are admitted to state prison for drug charges at a rate that is 20 to 57 times the white male rate.16

Human Rights Watch concluded, "Drug control policies bear primary responsibility for the quadrupling of the national prison population since 1980 and a soaring incarceration rate, the highest among western democracies.... No functioning democracy has ever governed itself with as large a percentage of its adults incarcerated as the United States."

Poor Prescription: The Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders in the United States
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
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That Lynch can do what he does and the article fawning over him be written at a moment like this is electrifying like realizing that you're looking at Marie Antoinette.