Extreme Milwaukee

Of every nine black men Wisconsin right now, one is stewing in prison and another one is on probation or parole, according to data supplied by the state Department of Corrections and the U.S. Census Bureau. In contrast, of every 200 white men, one is in prison and another two are on probation or parole

Milwaukee Journal: According to a new report on the confinement of juvenile offenders, a black kid's chances of being locked up in an institution in Wisconsin are 18 times that of a white kid—the third-highest racial gap in the nation. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency, based in Oakland, Calif., is¬sued the report, which featured an even scarier statistic: Wisconsin leads the nation in putting African-American kids in adult prisons.
Why is Wisconsin so extreme? After all, it's not extreme in crime. Even Milwaukee, where most of the state's African-Americans live, features proportionately less crime than cities where black kids aren't locked up so much. A case in point is Baltimore, with a rate of violent crime 70% higher than Milwaukee's, according to FBI data. Yet Wisconsin locks up black kids at more than four times the rate Maryland does
In truth, this is but the latest of many instances in which Wisconsin shows up as extreme with regard to race. On a whole slew of barometers of well-being— unemployment, mortgage-rejection, school graduation rates — the plight of African-Americans is the worst or almost the worst, or the gap between whites and blacks is the widest or almost the widest.