Posted on 04/18/2003 9:14:30 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
With little protest from its crime-weary citizens, the United States has become the prison camp of the Western world, locking up 2 million of its population. Young black men are a disproportionate number of the inmates. Among men between 20 and 34, 1.4 percent of white men and 4 percent of Hispanic men are behind bars. But 12 percent of black men in that same age group are incarcerated, according to the Justice Department.
That is a stunning statistic. No community can survive the effective loss of so many of its young men.
And the 12 percent figure manages to minimize the crisis, since it is a snapshot of the prison population over any given day. According to Allen Beck, chief demographer for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 30 percent of black men will be incarcerated during their lives.
Yet you hear little outcry from civil rights advocates. Al Sharpton has campaigned against slavery in Sudan. Jesse Jackson battles gender segregation at Augusta National. Georgia civil rights activist Tyrone Brooks protests the possible return of the Confederate battle flag to the state Capitol.
But the high rate of incarceration -- which is decimating the black working class -- is not the central focus of civil rights advocates. How could that be? It is the single most daunting challenge to black America today because it creates the conditions that lead to other failures.
Already, nearly 70 percent of black children are born outside the bonds of marriage -- leaving those children more vulnerable to educational failure, drug abuse and early parenthood themselves. A community is in trouble when children born to two-parent families represent a minority.
But with so many men of marriageable age behind bars, there is little hope for rebuilding the black family structure. Even when released from prison, those men will make poor prospects for marriage. With criminal histories, they will not easily find good jobs. Moreover, hard time in prison often turns a bad criminal into a worse one -- a man who will be disinclined to rejoin society on any but the most destructive terms.
Clearly, there are among black prisoners many violent felons who deserve their sentences. They are men who rob, murder, rape and maim, making war zones of their neighborhoods. The presence of violent predators not only endangers the lives of law-abiding citizens, but it also ruins economic prospects. Down-at-the-heels neighborhoods have a chance at rebirth only when their streets are safe.
But America's criminal justice system does a poor job of separating the hardened criminal from the minor offender with a shot at rehabilitation -- especially if the offenders are black. Research shows that black men are more likely to be imprisoned for minor offenses, while white men are more likely to be given probation for the same crimes.
This impulse to imprison black men now stretches to include the man-child. Frightened by a few highly publicized juvenile crimes, politicians began imposing harsher sanctions on juvenile offenders in the early 1990s. Predictably, the lash has fallen more frequently on black and brown boys than white.
Among young people who have never been to a juvenile prison, blacks are more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced by juvenile courts to prison time, according to a 2000 report, "And Justice for Some," issued by the Justice Department and several foundations. For those charged with drug offenses, black youths are 48 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prisons, the report said.
It is now possible to visit black neighborhoods where most of the young men have disappeared, where families spend their Sundays visiting their incarcerated loved ones, where boys believe going to prison is a rite of manhood. Those neighborhoods cannot hope to offer their residents a route into the American mainstream.
The epidemic of incarceration ought to be the full-time preoccupation of every civil rights group -- indeed, every human rights group -- in the country. It represents a grave threat to the future not only of black America but to all of America.
Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: cynthia@ajc.com.
Cindy has it exactly backwards, of course. It's not the incarceration that causes the illegitimacy. It's the illegitimacy that breeds the criminality. The lack of morality and self-control--that's the problem. Children growing up without structure and discipline--that's the problem.
Keep your pants zipped and your legs closed until marriage. Drop the gangsta rap and start hitting the books. Hard work and delayed gratification. That's the ticket to success.
Until blacks stop making excuses and blaming whites . . . until they start looking in the mirror and stigmatizing the bad actors within their own community . . . the black illegitimacy-crime problem will keep perpetuating itself.
Lots of blacks have figured this out. Actually, 40-50-60 years ago, the black community as a whole was doing better at this than they have been recently.
Absolutely wrong. There is NOT less drug dealing in the streets because of widespread imprisonment. But the drug dealing in the streets leads to tens of thousands more crimes than would otherwise occur, because the illegality of drugs makes the profit and the price so absurdly high.
Murders and robberies and burglaries of completely innocent people occur because drugs are illegal.
I beg Freepers to grasp this truth. Tens of thousands of completely innocent people are made the victims of crime because drugs are illegal. Is that a price acceptable to you?
A friend of mine was going down the hall of her rural home yesterday morning and a man (who happened to be black and on drugs) came out of her master bedroom and began beating her with a two by four. She managed to get herself, her teenaged daughter and her wheelchair bound son out of the house, and the man was chased down by law enforcement. My friend was sent to the hospital and thankfully, has no permanent injuries. The perpertrator was a repeat offender, and will likely be sent away for a VERY long time, perhaps for life.
My cousin was attacked in this same manner in this same community for the same reason, $$ for drugs, about 5 years ago, and was nearly killed. If her father had not gone over to her house, she would have been killed. If I'm not mistaken, the man who attacked my friend may be a relative of the man who nearly killed my cousin.
They can lead by example. They can deride those who would seek shelter in the "I'm a victim of racism" defense. They could get up in front of cameras and microphones and tell all blacks all over the country that a real man takes care of his family, has no use for drugs, and is a productive member of society. Black leaders could be very effective. Obviously, we've seen what not to do...
Tell me you're not serious...
Moreoever, children raised by only a father and no mother show NO heightened risk for crime. Not only do boys need a father just as much as they need a mother, they need one MORE. Don't hold your breath waiting for NOW to hold a press conference on that one.
"Note in the above statistics that while Black males make up only about 6% of the US population, they commit over half of all violent crimes and over 43% of all rapes"
Do these percentages reflect previous problems with the law? Prior records, etc?
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