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.
Possibly. There are a bunch of factors which might be in play. Anything from appearance to attitude to perhaps even family supervision.
I know for a fact that appearance matters. My brother was arrested with a bunch of other (all white) kids. All were equally involved in committing the crime. The other kids got crew cuts and nice new suits before seeing the Judge. My brother, refusing to be something he was not, (and my parents, sensing that the kid needed a wake up call) didn't cut his hair, wore regular (decent and clean) clothes. He was the ONLY one to receive jail time.
Cynthia actually hits on the truth here, of course she doesn't realize it. Do you think if maybe race pimps like Action Jackson and Al Charleton concentrated more efforts into addressing this sobering fact, rather than shaking down corporations on bogus lawsuits, the prison population would start to decline? ..... NAAAHHH !! That would cost them the protection racket they have going.
This is completely off base. Say the population is 8 to 1 white. If sexual assaults were uncorrelated with the race of victim or perpetrator, you would have w/w, w/b, b/w, b/b assaults in the ratio
64 : 8 : 8 : 1 ; note b/w = w/b since in the one case you have more perps but in the other case more targets.
With the reported ratios of 55 : 2 : 15 : 24 , you have perps in the ratio of 57 : 39 instead of 8 : 1, so a black man ( say ) is 5.4 times as likely to be a perp than a white man, but a black woman (assuming woman = target ) is 12 times as likely to be his victim than a white woman. Conversely, a white woman is 3.5 times as likely to be a victim of a white perp than a black woman, so black perps "favor" black victims to a much greater degree than white perps "favor" white victims.
That's got nothing to do with it. You were citing "white" vs. black statistics in the first place, so the "white" category is whatever it is, and represents some population that outnumbers blacks 8 to 1. You noted that b/w ( black perp, "white" victim ) assaults occurred with 8 times ( 15:2 ) the frequency as w/b, and then said that the "per capita ration" was 64 to 1 because "whites" outnumber blacks 8 to 1. This is false reasoning. As I pointed out, b/w and w/b assaults would be equal in number if "race" were uncorrelated with the likelihood of being a perp or a victim.
Furthermore, the comparison of b/w with w/b actually involves a complex combination of factors. Your figure of 64 to 1 is completely meaningless.
Just write or call they will send you the stats .
I should add that the comparison you ought to make is between w/w and b/w, which is 55:15 or 11:3, meaning 11 white victims are attacked by whites for every 3 white victims that are attacked by blacks. In this case, since the target population is constant, it's proper to correct for the greater number of potential white attackers and ( assuming attackers are men and victims are women ) say that a black man is 24/11 = 2.2 times as likely than a white man to attack a white woman. More than twice as likely! Quite shocking, but a far cry from 64.
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