IMPRISONED GENERATION

AMERICANS are quick to criticize others for their human rights abuses, but
it's overdue for our country to acknowledge the splinter in our own eye.

For example, a Washington-based advocacy group, the Justice Policy
Institute, brings news that there were more African-American males in jail
in 2000 than were enrolled in college: 791,600 versus 602,032.

The implications are enormous. Indeed, according to a professor at the John
Jay College of Criminal Justice, the figures ''tell us there has been a
public policy far overemphasizing investment in criminal justice instead of
in education for this group.''

Some will say, of course, that the reason more black males are in jail is
simple: They commit more crimes.

But not so fast. Historically, African Americans have been more heavily
policed, raising the possibility that white crime may be going undetected
and unpunished. Certainly, that's true in drug use.

Also, poverty is a factor. People with money, regardless of race, go to
jail less often than the poor.

Meanwhile, recent research also has shown that African Americans, including
juveniles, less often are given alternatives to incarceration and in
general draw harsher sentences than whites.

Does this mean that the hundreds of thousands of black males behind bars
aren't guilty? Certainly not.

However, as the spate of DNA exonerations of black men and repeated police
scandals have shown, many have been prosecuted and imprisoned unjustly.

And it's no coincidence that the nation's prison population skyrocketed,
quadrupling to 2.1 million in 2000 from 502,000 in 1980, just in time to
fill a prison construction boom that created new jobs and taxes for
otherwise economically depressed communities.

While imprisonment is limiting the future education and job options of so
many African-American men, their overwhelming numbers in prisons are
helping a lot of white families pay their children's tuitions from the
wages of corrections work.

Those jobs, however, are coming at a huge social cost that threatens only
to grow more onerous.