The research study intends to describe how there are more African Americans in prison than any other race Whether African American men or women in prison African Americans are still the leading race within the prison system. Based on the research, I intended to demonstrate that African Americans were the leading race in prison systems, but sometimes people don't always understand why or how some people's economic status and education can play a determining role in the direction of their lives. lives take them. The primary goal of this study was to determine whether African Americans are the leading race in the prison system. So I decided to find out if “there are more African Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty in prison, at a greater percentage than whites or Hispanics.” Imprisonment was and still is a form of criminal punishment that became well known in the United States after the American Revolution. PrisonPrisons have been around since the 1500s, but watching different movies and reading books before they became what they are today, people would put in things like dungeons. Imprisonment is the primary form of punishment or rehabilitation in the United States. It is known that the United States has the highest level of imprisonment. “Prison construction efforts in the United States have occurred in three major waves. The first began during the Jacksonian era and led to the widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary punishment for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War. The second began after the Civil War and gained momentum during the Progressive Era, introducing a variety of new mechanisms – such as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing – into the mainstream of p... ... the correlation according where economic status definitely influences educational status, causing a person to do things that could get them into trouble and possibly land them in prison. With both of these graphs they analyze federal, state and local prisons because there are approximately 2.3 million African Americans in prison, so this graph shows how they analyze how people are classified in prison. Based on statistics, there are more black men in prison than in college, in 2000 there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college compared to 1980 when there were 143,000 black men in prison and 463,700 enrolled in college ( Wikipedia.2014). In 2003 there was a change in the number of African Americans in college versus African Americans in prison, there was a significant increase in the number of people who actually went to college instead of prison.