Erik Eckholm has an article in the New York Times on the plight of black men in modern day America, and some of the statistics may surprise you.
¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990’s. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20’s were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20’s were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.
¶Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990’s and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20’s who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30’s, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
¶In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.
Think about those numbers. And think about these numbers:
Among black dropouts in their late 20’s, more are in prison on a given day — 34 percent — than are working — 30 percent — according to an analysis of 2000 census data by Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley…
…About half of all black men in their late 20’s and early 30’s who did not go to college are noncustodial fathers…
There is a lot of debate about what is causing this state of affairs. Explanations vary from it being an unintentional legacy of Welfare (eroding the nuclear family), the loss of low-skill jobs, the state of public education in the inner cities, to a problem with the black culture itself. But, for my money, nothing has contributed to this problem more than the Drug War and the draconian sentences that go with it.
Mr. Holzer of Georgetown and his co-authors cite two factors that have curbed black employment in particular.
First, the high rate of incarceration and attendant flood of former offenders into neighborhoods have become major impediments. Men with criminal records tend to be shunned by employers, and young blacks with clean records suffer by association, studies have found.
Arrests of black men climbed steeply during the crack epidemic of the 1980’s, but since then the political shift toward harsher punishments, more than any trends in crime, has accounted for the continued growth in the prison population, Mr. Western said.
Racism is part of the problem. “Young blacks with clean records suffer by association” with the floods of parolees that fill their urban neighborhoods. Sending so many black men to prison eventually creates a paradigm where all black men are thought to be either convicts, or potential convicts. And, it hardly needs to be added, that given our judicial system, many of the parolees are not a good influence on the neighborhoods they return to.
Creating low skill jobs in the cities, improving urban education, expanding grants and loans…all of these things are necessary and important. But, until we stop incarcerating 20% of black males that don’t attend college, we won’t make a lot of progress in turning things around in the cities.
Ending the Drug War is the single most productive thing we could do to help black men get a step up in American society.
The Drug War has swept up such a large population of black men that almost every urban black family knows an uncle, or a cousin, that has been impacted. Sometimes they are the victims of drug-related crime, other times their loved ones have wound up in prison. Doing time loses its sense of shame, and therefore the threat of doing time loses a lot of its deterrent effect. There is a certain snowball effect that has occurred. When the neighborhoods are filled with men that cannot find legitimate work because of their criminal record, a failure to look for legitimate work loses its sense of shame. And finding illegal sources of income, being the simpler path, also loses its sense of shame.
In short, the Drug War erodes the culture. It reinforces itself. It legitimizes and excuses crime.
Any comprehensive program that aims to tackle the problem of black male unemployment, must put an end to the Drug War front and center as the single most important piece.
The starting point should be ending mandatory sentencing.
Well, I don’t know if it would affect unemployment, but ending the drug war is a great idea. I’d go beyond your:
all the way to “ending all sentencing”. I wouldn’t call myself a Libertarian on most things but on drugs I agree with them.
What you put in your veins, nose, mouth or any other orifice is your business and nobody else’s. The FDA can make recommendations about what’s dangerous and what’s efficacious – that’s fine – but legislating it is a whole other story.
The Volstead Act is now universally condemned as unenforcable folly by the same people who want to stamp out other drugs by making their sale and possession a criminal offense. The logic escapes me.
And after we put an end to mandatory minimum sentencing (and go back and review the cases of people who were screwed by those laws and make things right), let’s take the money we’re saving by not having those people in jail and spend it on something positive, like providing education or job skills for these people.
when you look at numbers that show 72% of black men without a high school diploma are unemployed, you should notice that about a third of that 72% are unemployed because they are in prison. Not only does the fact that they are in prison effect unemployment, but when they get out they are unlikely to find a legitimate job that pays anything. And they will therefore enter the hidden economy. This puts them at risk for recidivism, but it also acts as a bad model for other young men in the neighborhood. There are so many black men around that are convicts that there is little stigma attached to being a convict. So many people have done time, that there is little fear of doing time.
It all adds up, and it contributes to the situation we have today.
A first step is reducing the sentences. But the real step is to stop putting such a huge percentage of the population in jail. If they have committed a violent crime, then by all means they should pay the penalty. But until we dry up the pool of convicts we won’t be able to stop the cycle of despair.
BooMan, if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend From Pieces to Weight.
It provides a firsthand look at exactly what is going down in the ghettos across the country.
I learned a lot from the book about not only how the drug war and illegality of drugs in general are killing our poor neighborhoods, but it is also an interesting study in the dangers of unbridled capitalism.
thanks. That looks interesting.
We need to think about the purpose(s) for incarceration. I submit that your comment “If they have committed a violent crime, then by all means they should pay the penalty.” is based, knowingly or not, in religious ideas about sin and redemption. I propose that the only purpose of incarceration be the protection of the public. For practical as well as philosophical reasons.
And along with other posters, I agree that we should put the $50k/year cost, or whatever the figure is, into intensive counseling. Needless to say, there are people who cannot be socialized due to incurable mental illness, etc.
What do others think about this?
the justice system has to provide some of the function that would otherwise be taken up by the families and friends of crime victims. It must punish, so that others won’t feel the need to take the law into their own hands.
However, there is little merit in taking a criminal off the streets for 16 months or 5 years and then putting them back into society as a hardened criminal with decreased prospects for being a productive member of society.
The answer, to me, lies in a tiered prison system, where inmates much up or down depending on behavior. With good behavior an inmate could ultimately wind up getting a free vocational education, for example.
Prison reform is an especially complicated area of social policy because of the jurisdictional problems and decentralization, even privatization, of the prison systems.
Agreed. If you’re going to put people back out onto the street, why make certain they will be even less functional and more dangerous?
The answer for me lies in the original assertion that we need to end the prohibition economic system imposed by the drug war.
12.5% of arrests in America are drug related. Regulate the market and the American arrest rate goes down by that amount, at a minimum.
End the Jim Crow practice of felon disenfranchisement and the drug warriors would dry up since it is felon disenfranchisement that gives purpose to the drug war for racists and authoritarians working to control our electoral process and apportionment.
Drug warriors consider even terrorism to be acceptable collateral damage in this civil war, the drug war. Meeting them halfway, with any programs ways for incarcerating people, gives the prohibitionists the entire win.
Many mandatory drug convictions don’t involve any violence, or even a ‘victim’ in the way the law understands the word. Decriminalization & rehab could go a long ways towards reducing the cycle of incarceration. I read recently where a federal judge had refused to use the mandatory sentencing guidelines, objecting that they discriminated by demanding harsher sentences for crack cocaine than for the equivalent amount of powder. There’s some momentuum in CA now for revising the 3 strikes law, which has resulted in a ridiculous amount of 25 – life sentences for non-violent offenders. It may not be sound policy, but the prison industry (guards, construction, maintenance, services, vocational training, etc) is big business, so expect resistance to change to be fierce.
Re: construction:
I’ve put rest of this comment in the diary, Drug War, prisons, & profits: Catherine Austin Fitts, which analyzes even bigger profits at stake in this game.
Those rich men who want more money again.
Certainly without racism, it would be more difficult, if not impossible, to maintain mainstream support for the policies, but it is just a tool in that sense, much as anti-Muslim sentiment and religious rivalry, whatever the anti-Otherism du jour may be, is a tool to maintain support for US foreign policy.
The War on Drugs itself is powered by the same engine. Marijuana, for example, is a weed that will grow wild in the gutters in many parts of the US. Yet it has been turned into a multi-billion dollar industry!
Not much profit for anybody from a freely available weed…
But transformed into the high-profit business, it dovetails nicely with America’s rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex, recession proof, a perennial investor favorite.
The last figures I saw, 142 out of 143 Americans are still at large, however efforts are being made to get those numbers up.
The US has now surpassed not only every other country in the world today in percentage of population imprisoned, but has also left the Soviet Union in its heyday as well as Apartheid South Africa in the dust.
The poor may work two low paying jobs all their lives and the profit they produce for the corporations still will not compare to their potential as generators of a revenue stream once imprisoned.
of separating the drug use (which should be a medical problem, not a legal one) from crimes committed due to drug use. If you’re using marijuana, that’s a medical issue, but if you’re caught driving under the influence of marijuana, that should be treated like driving under influence of alcohol or other impairing substance.
But ending mandatory sentencing would be a start — it would give judges some leeway so they could differentiate between a guy with a couple of seeds in his pocket and Nate Newton with a van full of weed… 😉
Jonathan Kozol has a new book out about the re-segregation of American schools.
Here is a link to a review:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Third_World_US/Shame_Nation_Kozol.html
A typical example of the effects of segregation is the amount of money provided per student. One of his examples is to compare NYC with a nearby, affluent, suburban district. NYC: $11,000 per student, Manhasset: $22,000.
The schools are once again separate and unequal. The rest follows from that.
But this is the whole point of the Wo(S)D, keep non-white people and the lower classes in their place. It has been the point from the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act on. Look at the rhetoric of legislators bureau chiefs talking about saving the children. Of course they mean their children and the children of people like them. White children, upper class children.
It’s worth noting as relevant to this that the justice system has an institutional race/class bias.
All other things being equivalent, people of color who use illegal drugs are more likely to be arrested for it.
All other things being equivalent, people of color are more likely to be prosecuted.
All other things being equivalent, people of color are more likely to be convicted.
All other things being equivalent, people of color tend to get harsher sentences.
All other things being equivalent, people of color are less likely to be released early.
For people with any interest in this topic, I highly recommend The Sentencing Project.
During his campaigns, Bush’s history of “youthful indescretions” were handled gently when they weren’t totally ignored. If he hadn’t grown up white and well-off, he very likely would have spent time in jail.
It’s also worth noting that the same thing is true of Al Gore. Both major candidates in the 2000 presidential election supported legal policies that, if those they had been evenly enforced when the men were younger, might have landed them both in jail.
Booman:
Thanks for hitting all of the points I could not get to in responding to this New York Times story. The permanent disenfranchised criminal underclass, created mostly by the drug war, is more than 13 million and growing according to the NYT. The drug war has been, from day one, the subversion of the Voter Rights Act and the 26st Amendment. At this the drug war is a major success. Articles like this NYT piece simply document this fact.
This weekend, I wrote three essays that create an holistic analysis of most of the issues that I track most closely regarding the drug war. Terrorism, crime and democracy.
The Wash Post Marc Emery response piece focuses on terrorism and national security threats posed by the drug war. On Saturday, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette story about increasing gangsterism in small town West Virginia provided the opportunity to discuss prohibition economics and crime in America. Today, this New York Times story about the social alienation of Black men in America closed the circle tying it all together with the ‘why’ of it all. The Jim Crow subversion of America’s democracy.
Marc Emery, to DEA a greater threat than bin Laden
Street crime and terrorism fostered by drug prohibition
Black American suffrage is the enemy
AT: Pennsylvania -democracy incarcerated-
Prisoners of the Census
Miscounting prisoners undercounts democracy
“In 48 states prisoners cannot vote, but the Census counts the nation’s mostly urban prisoners as residents of the mostly rural towns that host prisons. Every decade, states use these “phantom” populations to redraw state legislative boundaries and re-apportion political representatives and power accordingly. With U.S. incarceration now setting worldwide records, and the consequences of that falling disproportionately on people of color, the harm to our democracy and civil rights is measurable and profound.”
EDITORIAL OBVSERVER
New York Times
Why Some Politicians Need Their Prisons to Stay Full
By BRENT STAPLES
Dec. 27, 2004
“The idea of counting inmates as voters in the counties that imprison them is particularly repulsive given that inmates are nearly always stripped of the right to vote. The practice recalls the early United States under slavery, when slaves were barred from voting but counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in Congress.”
I’m surprised to find myself using the word “proletariat” in a sincere polemic, but here goes:
As a former employee of the ‘prison-industrial complex’ and a current member of the defense bar, I have to say that WAY over 90% of the people arrested not only did what they were arrested for, but also additional, worse, offenses. I usually find this to be true regardless of color or class background.
Now my observations are most certainly skewed, practicing exclusively in a large urban city (Philadelphia)- but what I have found is that the poor, regardless of race, are more and more living in 3rd and sometimes even 4th generation dysfunctional families. The only exception I can make to this generalization are immigrant groups. This anecdotal observation matches with the above cited statistics, which show that 34% of white dropouts are long term jobless compared to only 19% of comparable hispanics. My guess is that middle class (and up) whites skew the numbers in the study- if one looked at a subset of whites that was demographically identical to african americans in income levels, education and urbanization then one would find almost equivalent jobless and incarceration numbers.
BooMan does hit on something that I do agree is a root problem- Hopelessness and a loss of the shame that was attached to a jobless lifestyle. But I don’t see the war on drugs as the root of the problem, only a stupid, ineffective and overpriced ‘solution’.
I blame Bad Parents and Good TV. Bad parents don’t get much of a mention here because most of the time they come about because they themselves had bad parents. However, Good TV has only been around for a single generation. The first generation that grew up on TV had shows like the Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, and I’m not going to argue that those shows were in some way artistically superior to modern TV fare- but they were socially responsible.
Ralph and Alice Kramden had no kids, and Ralph had a good job with the MTA- but they only had a dresser, a table, four chairs and a bed- all thoroughly generic. Over the seasons they added a vanity table and a recliner- each of which were introduced in their own episodes that focused on what an expense those items were. Ricky Ricardo owned a nightclub and had a lucrative gig as a musician. Fred and Ethel Mertz owned an apartment building in New York- and their homes were still furnished quite modestly. Compare that to the homes one finds in modern shows about working or middle class people- Rosanne had furniture and doodads all over her house that are beyond the reach of my own two income household. The “Friends” lived in apartments that probably would have cost $20,000.00 a month amid furniture that would set you back six figures.
Since sometime in the seventies, TV has (most likely to satisfy the desire for product placement among advertisers) placed its characters in fiscally unrealistic settings. As a result, people whose sense of values (cash money wise, not morals wise) are all screwed up. When people compare the fruits of their own labor with the rewards that TV has taught them to expect for that labor they feel ripped off or, if they have low self esteem, they believe they must be of particularly low value. In either case, abandoning the labor market is not only understandable but reasonable as well.
As for solutions, I don’t think Honeymooners reruns will do the trick. Nor do I think the republican policy of creating a peasant class and keeping them in their place is an acceptable solution. Most generally, I think we will have the malaise of a hereditary underclass until we can ensure both a reasonable return on labor and provide the general population with a basic understanding of economics, particularly on the household level.
I for one had this great class called Home Economics that covered a lot of important issues- however, as a parent I have learned that HomeEc is now missing from the curricula of most schools and where it is taught it is often a glorified cooking elective.
the middle class, I think, have more to do with social problems than a long list of things that are more popular to mention in discussions of this subject.
Yes, people feel ripped off for their labor, because no matter how hard you work, if you have a low income, not only are you not going to “get ahead,” you are not even going to be able to stay in the same place. Literally. Your landlord will raise the rent more than your employer will raise your wage. Ditto the utility companies, the grocery store, the gas station, and medical treatment is now such a luxury item that even the discretionary resource class is complaining about it.
Back in those black and white days of modest furniture, the people who watched Lucy and Ricky, even though they might be poor, had hope. They had been taught than in the US, if you work hard, you will be rewarded. You will get ahead. And in those days, for many people, it was true. Those good paying union jobs with benefits produced children who went to college.
But their children will be the first US generation to be less prosperous than their parents. And as you go down the economic class ladder, that end to upward mobility is older and more solid and ingrained. And true.
A person born into poverty in the US today has about as much chance today of reaching the middle class and having even modest disretionary resources as she or he has of winning the lottery.
Most of that middle class is itself downsliding into poverty.
The grandchildren of those good union job workers who worked hard and got ahead, whose children know all about Brie and thread counts are increasingly moving back home, or never leaving it, to live with their parents, because they cannot afford housing. That Holy Grail of the four year university diploma that so many generations have been taught is their ticket to prosperity, their magic amulet to ward off poverty, has lost its power.
In the lower economic classes, people have known this for a while. And they know that it is not realistic to suppose that they could get one anyway. Immigrants are more likely than native-born to understand from the beginning of their life in the US that bricklaying or fingernail and hair design skills will get them a higher hourly wage than selling the shoes in the fancy store. It will not, however, get them one of the decreasing slots in the middle class.
A middle class does not benefit the lords in a single industry feudal state. What benefits the lords are serfs desperate enough to work increasingly long hours for less and less pay. If you lose a serf job because you have been priced out of housing and no longer have an address, there is always someone who is more skilled at faking addresses, and does not aspire to housing, but will do anything for a meal.
Functional families do not benefit the lords, either. African-American families have been “dysfunctional” since slavery times. This is not because the family members wish it so, it is because the lords wish it so.
And now the same thing begins with the erstwhile middle class. The families are spread out, the children cannot care for the elders because they do not have the money to purchase larger housing, or move t where the elders are. They are not able to take in other family members as they are priced out of housing. Without those family members, if they wish to work, who will care for their children? The wage they can realistically hope for would be barely enough to pay for the child care, with none left to feed and house the child. They must hope to survive somehow on “welfare,” which is a token payment not sufficient even for survival, much less learning skills or getting ahead, nor is it intended to be. It is set up backwards. Instead of taking away what benefits she has if she is fortunate enough to come by some minimum wage job and find someone to keep her kids for free, the “welfare” should be increased if she gets a job, and should provide her with child care in the first place. The “welfare” should include skills training, and not the crap programs where they tell people about the importance of daily flossing and teach them to mop floors, but training for a living wage job.
But it is not intended that she should have a living wage and be self supporting, and pay taxes. She, and her children, will provide a greater financial benefit to the lords as prisoners.
However, I do experience a lot of people moving up economically- a small fraction of the overall population, but it is very real and barring unforseen tragedy (which the social contract should, but does not, cover) achaivable situation. But it almost always involves joining the ownership class, setting up one’s own hair salon, or going out on one’s own as a sub-contractor.
Where you are dead on correct is in the area of housing prices as home ownership is (by design) a necessary element of upward economic mobility. Some of the problems with the housing market will shake out in the coming market correction- however one of the reasons for housing cost inflation is the size of the houses that are being built- this again goes to the issue of unrealistic expectations and a demand driven under-stock of truly affordable housing.
One can build perfectly livable $50k houses, its just that not enough people want to live in them (the right customers almost always do better renting or purchasing “tired” higher end housing which can’t be effectively maintained at the income levels that allow their purchase, leading to blight.
Nevertheless, I do fully agree that ChimpCo is dead set on recreating a feudal system.
I suspect there would be millions of people who would love to live in a $50K house. However since housing is a commercial commodity, not considered a human right, there would not be as much profit in building a house and selling it for $50K.
In fact, there are many $50K houses available on the market, they are priced at between $125 and $150K though. 😉
And yes, the difference between expectations and reality is vast. There are many people, poor people, who have an expectation that if they work 40 hours a week at any job, they should be able to afford the basics of survival for themselves and one or two dependents.
But because the market has valued a day of their labor as less than the value of a day’s survival, those expectations are not met, and this does entail some social costs.
It also means that the feudal system is not a future danger, but a present reality, and while it is one that the current administration certainly champions, its implementation did not start with Bush.
Today the premise that a days’ work should be worth at least a day’s survival is considered, even by many who consider themselves “liberal” or “progressive” to be a radical notion. A surprising number actually consider it to be socialism. Others will call it a “handout.”
You do not get that kind of thing ingrained in the culture over the space of a few years.
Quite a few efforts are made at putting $50-80K houses onto the market- many by CDC’s, but entrepreneurs try it on a fairly regular basis as well. The problem is the housing winds up in the rental market either because it goes wanting for a buyer (if one can get a conventional fixed rate mortgage at $70K then one can get a $125k house with a 105% mortgage) or the returns on using it as rental property are better due to general overvaluation in housing.
Because of market incentives and tastes it is a waste of time for business to build inexpensive housing for sale, and because of the way most public and private housing assistance is structured the emphasis is on creating rental properties.
yuck.
mortgage. Or on any terms that would give them a reasonable chance of staying in housing for more years than they will be able to renting.
And I think that is what you mean about expectations kicks in, it is not the poor, but those who were raised in discretionary resource class homes, who have the expectation that they are entitled to a middle class lifestyle, which now costs more than it used to. So they allow themselves to be talked into accepting terrible mortgages for “more house than they can afford, those “adjustable” and “interest only” mortgages that in my opinion, are criminal acts, I could go on, but you get my point.
The poor, who would love to have the $50K home cannot afford it. They cannot afford any housing, that is why they are poor.
And those newly downshifted from the middle class do not want them, because they do not wish to believe that they have been downshifted.
However, they will be downshifted even further when their mortgage payments are “adjusted” this year and next, and when their interest only term runs out, and in the intervening time, their income will not have increased. In the best of cases it will remain the same, however since the cost of everything else will have risen, the effect will be the same as a decrease, and they will be unable to afford the $150K house when if they had gone with the $95K townhome it might at least have kept them in housing a bit longer.
The prohibition of marijuana is a religious discrimination.
Marijuana is the tree of life, outlawed by the Jewish ‘god’ (somebodys father). The Snake represents the offering of wisdom, the apples of course, are the female marijuana flower buds, usually eaten.
As a practicing Native American I would appreciate it if Snake Nature could now be recognized for what it is and be Respected, rather then ignorantly feared and attacked as in the Old World way.
Fear does not make you any safer from snakes. Rushing headlong into shadows or off cliffs because you are afraid of snakes is stupid and very unfair to snakes.
Medical knowledge until fairly recently was the knowing of useful herbs, marijuana included, and practices, now it is big business. Food is the best medicine.
If you doubt there IS a connection between religion and marijuana prohibition, check out the THC Ministry or any of the many other marijuana religions.
Please include in your thinking the admission at the onset of the Drug War Against Some People that it would impact ‘Hindus’ and ‘Mexicans’ – a typical term of the time like ‘greasers’ to identify Native Americans, very few Mexicans are not Native American. This was not considered a big deal at the time due to their minority status.
BTW, did you know that the peace sign hand symbol is also the Cannabian hand signal for our sacred marijuana flower? Heh, heh. Snakes have to be sneaky, the fat broad is always out there with a big stick.
I am a daughter of the Rainbow Tribe. I was born into the Rainbow Tribe and I know it’s secrets and it’s history. The Tribe is not about marijuana, but marijuana is one of our sacred substances, so it is a useful identifier for our continuing persecution.
I do ceremonies. I remade my people’s broken hoop, the Rainbow Hoop.
I speak out to bring my people their religious freedom.
I send prayers on my smoke for them and for their freedom on the four winds.
Please bring my message to all the incarcerated of Our People and to all those who care about them.
Please tell them the message of the THC Ministry: Tell them, they are the victims of laws written to discriminate against them based on some people’s religion. Wrong motives must be corrected for correct actions to take place.
Marijuana People do have the US Marijuana Party to rally these issues if they want to organize a counter message. It is inspired by the Canadian party headed by Marc Emery. The US Marijuana Party T-shirt makes a great conversation starter. Thank you Marc!
Marc and I share culture and religion, we both practice doing giveaway, an important Native American religious ceremony.