Islam Times - Gay is cool. Black or Muslim not so cool

Islam Times - A new study by the Equality and Human Rights Commission into how ‘fair’ Britain has become shows that while homosexuality is now widely accepted being black or Muslim is as problematic as ever.

One of the most alarming findings of the study is that the proportion of black people in prison in England and wales, almost seven times more per population, is higher than in the United States, where the number is four times as many.

Commenting on the findings of the report Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust said: "People will be and should be shocked by this data, we have a tendency to say we are better than the US, but we have not got prison right."

According to the report despite black people making up less then 3% of the population yet they amounted to 15% of people stopped by police, subjected to more then 145,000 stop and searches in 2008.

The reports other key findings have been listed below.

• Five times more black people than white people per head of population in England and Wales are imprisoned.

• The ethnic minority prison population has doubled in a decade – from 11,332 in 1998 to 22,421 in 2008.

• A quarter of the people in prison are from an ethnic minority.

• Muslims make up 12% of the prison population in England and Wales

• Number of women prisoners has nearly doubled since 1995 in England and Wales.

• Black children are three times as likely to be permanently excluded from education.

• At the top end of GCSE’s the two highest performing groups are students of Chinese and Indian origin.

• A quarter of men of Pakistani descent drive for a living – mostly in a taxi cab.

• Opposition to working for an ethnic minority boss and aversion to mixed-race marriages has dropped.

• No significant fall in the level of rape or serious sexual assault recorded in the British crime survey over the last five years.

• Last year over a quarter of all rapes reported to the police in England and Wales were committed against children aged under 16, while that figure rose to over half for male rapes.