Thanks, Sakira. So we’ll be discussing why U.S. prisoners are disproportionately people of color and what can be done about this. I’m going to get the conversation started by describing my research on this and then I’ll pose some questions to you specifically about the federal system.

An overview of this issue: Blacks and Latinos comprise almost 60% of the incarcerated population, yet only 30% of the U.S. population. The over-representation is even worse in the federal system, where African Americans and Hispanics comprise over 70 percent of the prisoner population.

So the first question is why this over-representation exits. I’ve explored this in a report published by the The Sentencing Project. Let me say a few words about our findings and then I’ll ask you how these issues play out in the federal system.