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12 Jan 17
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From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a modest decline to 707 people per 100,000 in 2012. In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million. The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers.
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What caused this? Crime would seem the obvious culprit: Between 1963 and 1993, the murder rate doubled, the robbery rate quadrupled, and the aggravated-assault rate nearly quintupled. But the relationship between crime and incarceration is more discordant than it appears. Imprisonment rates actually fell from the 1960s through the early ’70s, even as violent crime increased. From the mid-’70s to the late ’80s, both imprisonment rates and violent-crime rates rose. Then, from the early ’90s to the present, violent-crime rates fell while imprisonment rates increased.
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When the doors finally close and one finds oneself facing banishment to the carceral state—the years, the walls, the rules, the guards, the inmates—reactions vary. Some experience an intense sickening feeling. Others, a strong desire to sleep. Visions of suicide. A deep shame. A rage directed toward guards and other inmates. Utter disbelief. The incarcerated attempt to hold on to family and old social ties through phone calls and visitations. At first, friends and family do their best to keep up. But phone calls to prison are expensive, and many prisons are located far from one’s hometown.
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Michigan prisons assign each inmate to a level corresponding to the security risk the inmate is believed to pose. As the levels decrease, privileges—yard time, for instance—increase. Level V is maximum security. Level I is for prisoners who will soon be released. At Level IV, you will find many prisoners with life sentences and not many prisoners with fewer than five years left to serve. A prisoner with a life sentence who has reached Level II has generally proved that he or she is not a danger to others. But there are very few such prisoners, because it is very hard to remain at the more draconian levels without acquiring “tickets”—demerits for violating prison protocol, often involving fighting. “It’s hard to stay ticket-free for 10 years without somebody getting stabbed, somebody getting into a fight,” Braceful, who is now out of prison, explained to me when I visited him in Detroit last December. “Because there are people that are there who might look at you and go, ‘He’s a small guy. I’m gonna take advantage of him.’ ”
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Michigan leads the country in the average length of a prison stay—4.3 years—yet most prisoners do eventually say goodbye. The bliss of freedom, the joy of family reunion, can quickly be tempered by the challenge of staying free. The transition can be jarring. “I panicked,” Tonya told me, speaking of how it felt to be out of prison after 18 years. “I was only used to a cell as opposed to having multiple rooms, and there was always somebody there with me in the cell—whether it was a bunkie or officer, somebody’s always in this building. To go from that to this? I stayed on the phone. I made people call me, you know. It was scary. And I still experience that to this day. Everybody looks suspect to me. I’m like, ‘He’s up to something.’ A friend of mine told me, ‘You’ve been gone a long time, over a decade, so it’s gonna take you about two years for you to readjust.’ ”
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Ex-offenders are excluded from a wide variety of jobs, running the gamut from septic-tank cleaner to barber to real-estate agent, depending on the state. And in the limited job pool that ex-offenders can swim in, blacks and whites are not equal. For her research, Pager pulled together four testers to pose as men looking for low-wage work. One white man and one black man would pose as job seekers without a criminal record, and another black man and white man would pose as job seekers with a criminal record. The negative credential of prison impaired the employment efforts of both the black man and the white man, but it impaired those of the black man more. Startlingly, the effect was not limited to the black man with a criminal record. The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one. “High levels of incarceration cast a shadow of criminality over all black men, implicating even those (in the majority) who have remained crime free,” Pager writes. Effectively, the job market in America regards black men who have never been criminals as though they were.
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In America, the men and women who find themselves lost in the Gray Wastes are not picked at random. A series of risk factors—mental illness, illiteracy, drug addiction, poverty—increases one’s chances of ending up in the ranks of the incarcerated. “Roughly half of today’s prison inmates are functionally illiterate,” Robert Perkinson, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, has noted. The quote is from Robert Perkinson’s Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, a deeply disturbing history of the modern era of mass incarceration. There is good deal of sociological and economic study on mass incarceration, but considerably less in the way of history. What I would love to see is a book that took the long view of incarceration, crime, and racism. Too many accounts begin in the 1960s. At any rate Perkinson’s book is a crucial contribution to the literature in that it tells us precisely how we got here. “Four out of five criminal defendants qualify as indigent before the courts.” Sixty-eight percent of jail inmates were struggling with substance dependence or abuse in 2002. One can imagine a separate world where the state would see these maladies through the lens of government education or public-health programs. Instead it has decided to see them through the lens of criminal justice. As the number of prison beds has risen in this country, the number of public-psychiatric-hospital beds has fallen. The Gray Wastes draw from the most socioeconomically unfortunate among us, and thus take particular interest in those who are black.
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10 Jan 17
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with its high rates of “broken homes, illegitimacy, and female-oriented homes.”
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Instead his report was portrayed as an argument for leaving the black family to fend for itself.
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But Moynihan still professed concern for the family, and for the black family in particular. He began pushing for a minimum income for all American families.
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This was a personal victory for Moynihan—a triumph in an argument he had been waging since the War on Poverty began, over the need to help families, not individuals.
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The Family Assistance Plan died in the Senate.
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From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a modest decline to 707 people per 100,000 in 2012. In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million.
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In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers.
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Banishment continues long after one’s actual time behind bars has ended, making housing and employment hard to secure.
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At a cost of $80 billion a year, American correctional facilities are a social-service program—providing health care, meals, and shelter for a whole class of people.
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a black population reeling under the effects of 350 years of bondage and plunder. He believed that these effects could be addressed through state action. They were—through the mass incarceration of millions of black people.
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America’s incarceration rate (which accounts for people in prisons and jails) is roughly 12 times the rate in Sweden, eight times the rate in Italy, seven times the rate in Canada, five times the rate in Australia, and four times the rate in Poland.
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The emergence of the carceral state has had far-reaching consequences for the economic viability of black families. Employment and poverty statistics traditionally omit the incarcerated from the official numbers.
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As the visits and phone calls diminish, the incarcerated begins to adjust to the fact that he or she is, indeed, a prisoner. New social ties are cultivated. New rules must be understood. A blizzard of acronyms, sayings, and jargon—PBF, CSC, ERD, “letters but no numbers”—must be comprehended. If the prisoner is lucky, someone—a cell mate, an older prisoner hailing from the same neighborhood—takes him under his wing. This can be the difference between survival and catastrophe. On Richard Braceful’s first night in Carson City Correctional Facility, in central Michigan, where he had been sent away at age 29 for armed robbery, he decided to take a shower. It was 10 p.m. His cell mate stopped him. “Where are you going?” the cell mate asked. “I’m going to take a shower,” Braceful responded. His cell mate, a 14-year veteran of the prison system, blocked his way and said, “You’re not going to take a shower.” Braceful, reading the signs, felt a fight was imminent. “Calm down,” his cell mate told him. “You don’t take a shower after 9 o’clock. People that are sexual predators, people that are rapists, they go in the showers right behind you.” Braceful and the veteran sat down. The veteran looked at him. “It’s your first time being locked up, ain’t it?” he said. “Yeah, it is,” Braceful responded. The veteran said to him, “Listen, this is what you have to do. For the next couple of weeks, just stay with me. I’ve been here for 14 years. I’ll look out for you until you learn how to move around in here without getting yourself hurt.”
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Michigan prisons assign each inmate to a level corresponding to the security risk the inmate is believed to pose. As the levels decrease, privileges—yard time, for instance—increase. Level V is maximum security. Level I is for prisoners who will soon be released. At Level IV, you will find many prisoners with life sentences and not many prisoners with fewer than five years left to serve. A prisoner with a life sentence who has reached Level II has generally proved that he or she is not a danger to others. But there are very few such prisoners, because it is very hard to remain at the more draconian levels without acquiring “tickets”—demerits for violating prison protocol, often involving fighting. “It’s hard to stay ticket-free for 10 years without somebody getting stabbed, somebody getting into a fight,” Braceful, who is now out of prison, explained to me when I visited him in Detroit last December. “Because there are people that are there who might look at you and go, ‘He’s a small guy. I’m gonna take advantage of him.’ ”
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Michigan leads the country in the average length of a prison stay—4.3 years—yet most prisoners do eventually say goodbye. The bliss of freedom, the joy of family reunion, can quickly be tempered by the challenge of staying free. The transition can be jarring. “I panicked,” Tonya told me, speaking of how it felt to be out of prison after 18 years. “I was only used to a cell as opposed to having multiple rooms, and there was always somebody there with me in the cell—whether it was a bunkie or officer, somebody’s always in this building. To go from that to this? I stayed on the phone. I made people call me, you know. It was scary. And I still experience that to this day. Everybody looks suspect to me. I’m like, ‘He’s up to something.’ A friend of mine told me, ‘You’ve been gone a long time, over a decade, so it’s gonna take you about two years for you to readjust.’ ”
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The challenges of housing and employment bedevil many ex-offenders. “It’s very common for them to go homeless,” Linda VanderWaal, the associate director of prisoner reentry at a community-action agency in Michigan, told me. In the winter, VanderWaal says, she has a particularly hard time finding places to accommodate all the homeless ex-prisoners. Those who do find a place to live often find it difficult to pay their rent.
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notes that most employers say that they would not hire a job applicant with a criminal record.
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“These employers appear less concerned about specific information conveyed by a criminal conviction and its bearing on a particular job,” Pager writes, “but rather view this credential as an indicator of general employability or trustworthiness.”
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09 Jan 17
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“the breakdown of the Negro family,” with its high rates of “broken homes, illegitimacy, and female-oriented homes.”
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06 Jan 17
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to find “creative strategies to make offenders suffer.”
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06 Dec 16
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1970s
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to the mid-’80s
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17 Oct 16
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egan pushing for a minimum income
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Family
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Plan
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Assistance
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From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a modest decline to 707 people per 100,000 in 2012.
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300,000 people to 2.2 million.
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sevenfold,
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g under the effects of 350 years of bondage and plunder. He believed that these effects could be addressed through state action. They were—through the mass incarceration of millions of black people.
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. But the relationship between crime and incarceration is more discordant than it appears.
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1985 to 2000, the likelihood of a long prison sentence nearly doubled for drug possession, tripled for drug trafficking, and quintupled for nonaggravated assault.
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then “what caused the Canadian rates to fall?”
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hrough it all, the children suffer.
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30 and 50 percent of all parolees in Los Angeles and San Francisco are homeless.
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984, 70 percent of all parolees successfully completed their term without arrest and were granted full freedom. In 1996, only 44 percent did. As of 2013, 33 percent do.
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movement, one criminal-justice researcher wrote at the time, was to find “creative strategies to make offenders suffer.”
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628 people per 100,000, is about average for an American state.
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I’ve been here for 14 years. I’ll look out for you until you learn how to move around in here without getting yourself hurt.”
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Michigan leads the country in the average length of a prison stay—4.3 years—yet most prisoners do eventually say goo
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One in four black men born since the late 1970s has spent time in prison.
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The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one.
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“High levels of incarceration cast a shadow of criminality over all black men, implicating even those (in the majority) who have remained crime free,” Pager writes. Effectively,
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Sixty-eight percent of jail inmates were struggling with substance dependence or abuse in 2002
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Celia’s status—black, enslaved, female—transformed an act of self-defense into an act of villainy.
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Lynching was a prudent act of self-defense.
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he American response to crime cannot be divorced from a history of equating black struggle—individual and collective—with black villainy.
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linking rising crime rates to Martin Luther King’s campaign of civil disobedience.
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We cannot ignore the fact that when we talk about drug abuse in our country, in the main, we are talking about the consequence it has for young males in inner cities
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Drug use is wrong because it is immoral,” he claimed, “and it is immoral because it enslaves the mind and destroys the soul.”
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No one can say I’m soft on crime.” In 1994, Bill Clinton signed a bill that offered grants to states that built prisons and cut back on parole, driving up the nation’s incarceration numbers. He now says he regrets doing that.
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Robert Perkinson’s Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire
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: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Mass incarceration “widened the income gap between white and black Americans,”
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Odell
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n black cities around the country, Jim Crow—with its housing segregation and job discrimination—imposed boundaries. And within those boundaries an order took root.
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nvestment, the pursuit of the War on Drugs on nakedly racist grounds, have only intensified the ancient American dilemma’s white-hot core—the problem of “past unequal treatment,” the difficulty of “damages,” the question of reparations.
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22 Sep 16
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Despite its alarming predictions, “The Negro Family” was a curious government report in that it advocated no specific policies to address the crisis it described.
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On August 18, the widely syndicated newspaper columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote that Moynihan’s document had exposed “the breakdown of the Negro family,” with its high rates of “broken homes, illegitimacy, and female-oriented homes.” These dispatches fell on all-too-receptive ears.
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hat Moynihan had said beset the black family. Moynihan’s aim in writing “The Negro Family” had been to muster support for an all-out government assault on the structural social problems that held black families down. (“Family as an issue raised the possibility of enlisting the support of conservative groups for quite radical social programs,” he would later write.) Instead his report was portrayed as an argument for leaving the black family to fend for itself.
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But Moynihan still professed concern for the family, and for the black family in particular. He began pushing for a minimum income for all American families. Nixon promoted Moynihan’s proposal—called the Family Assistance Plan—before the American public in a television address in August of 1969, and officially presented it to Congress in October. This was a personal victory for Moynihan—a triumph in an argument he had been waging since the War on Poverty began, over the need to help families, not individuals.
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But he was not rid of it. The Family Assistance Plan died in the Senate. In a 1972 essay in The Public Interest, Moynihan, who had by then left the White House and was a professor at Harvard, railed against “the poverty professionals” who had failed to support his efforts and the “upper-class” liars who had failed to see his perspective. He pointed out that his pessimistic predictions were now becoming reality. Crime was increasing. So were the number of children in poor, female-headed families. Moynihan issued a dire warning: “Lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”
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The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers.
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At a cost of $80 billion a year, American correctional facilities are a social-service program—providing health care, meals, and shelter for a whole class of people.
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Also, by confining black people to the same neighborhoods, these efforts ensured that people who were discriminated against, and hence had little, tended to be neighbors only with others who also had little.
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Finally, racial zoning condemned black people to the oldest and worst housing in the city—the kind where one was more likely to be exposed, as Odell Newton was, to lead. A lawyer who handled more than 4,000 lead-poisoning cases across three decades recently described his client list to The Washington Post: “Nearly 99.9 percent of my clients were black.”
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In their version of history, a courageous and blameless Moynihan made one mistake: He told the truth. For his sins—loving the black family enough to be honest—Moynihan was crucified by an intolerant cabal of obstinate leftists and Black Power demagogues. “Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist,
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11 Sep 16
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29 Jul 16Candy Boyer
"American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they've failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family” tragically helped create this system, it's time to reclaim his original intent."
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12 Jul 16
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10 Jun 16
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flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.”
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02 Jun 16
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18 Apr 16
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The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics.
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As African Americans began filling cells in the 1970s, rehabilitation was largely abandoned in favor of retribution—the idea that prison should not reform convicts but punish them
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Roughly half of today’s prison inmates are functionally illiterate
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Sixty-eight percent of jail inmates were struggling with substance dependence or abuse in 2002
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criminal justice
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The Gray
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Wastes draw from the most socioeconomically unfortunate among us, and thus take particular interest in those who are black.
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“How about you reduce crime? … The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70 to 75 percent of the time.”
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As executed by Bratton, this strategy relied on a policy of stop-and-frisk, whereby police officers could stop pedestrians on vague premises such as “furtive movements” and then question them and search them for guns and drugs.
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Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University law professor, found that blacks a
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nd Hispanics were stopped significantly more often than whites even “after adjusting stop rates for the precinct crime rates” and “other social and economic factors predictive of police activity.” Despite Giuliani’s claim that aggressive policing is justified because blacks are “killing each other,” Fagan found that between 2004 and 2009, officers recovered weapons in less than 1 percent of all stops—and recovered them more frequently from whites than from blacks. Yet blacks were 14 percent more likely to be subjected to force. In 2013 the policy, as carried out under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg, was ruled unconstitutional.
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This was not public safety driving policy—it was law enforcement tasked with the job of municipal plunder.
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Crime within the black community was primarily seen as a black problem, and became a societal problem mainly when it seemed to threaten the white population.
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A common tool in homicide cases was to threaten black suspects with capital punishment to extract a guilty plea, which mandated a life sentence
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The principal source of the intensifying war on crime was white anxiety about social control.
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If one purpose of prison is to protect the public, then high rates of life imprisonment make little sense
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The lesson of Minnesota is that the chasm in incarceration rates is deeply tied to the socioeconomic chasm between black and white America
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. The two are self-reinforcing—impoverished black people are more likely to end up in prison, and that experience breeds impoverishment.
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10 Apr 16
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Deindustrialization had presented an employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races. Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks.
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Like the bestial blacks of the 19th century, super-predators proved to be the stuff of myth.
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If men and women like Odell are cast deep within the barrens of the Gray Wastes, their families are held in a kind of orbit, on the outskirts, by the relentless gravity of the carceral state. For starters, the family must contend with the financial expense of having a loved one incarcerated.
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national movement toward punishing inmates more harshly and for longer periods.
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Odell was born in the midst of an era of government-backed housing discrimination.
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These efforts curtailed the ability of black people to buy better housing, to move to better neighborhoods, and to build wealth. Also, by confining black people to the same neighborhoods, these efforts ensured that people who were discriminated against, and hence had little, tended to be neighbors only with others who also had little. Thus while an individual in that community might be high-achieving, even high-earning, his or her ability to increase that achievement and wealth and social capital, through friendship, marriage, or neighborhood organizations, would always be limited. A lot of this section depends on the ever-insightful Robert Sampson, and more broadly the focus on neighborhood dynamics in contemporary sociology. The notion of compounded deprivation, which Rob discusses here, really elucidates the difficulty in making easy comparisons between blacks and whites. And so talking about a white middle class and a black middle class as though they are socio-economic equals, or as though the only difference is having to give their children “The Talk” really misses that these two groups live in different worlds. Specifically, the world of the black middle class is—because of policy—significantly poorer. Thus to wonder about the difference in outcomes between the black and white middle class, is really to wonder about the difference in weight between humans living on the Earth and humans living on the moon. Finally, racial zoning condemned black people to the oldest and worst housing in the city—the kind where one was more likely to be exposed, as Odell Newton was, to lead. A lawyer who handled more than 4,000 lead-poisoning cases across three decades recently described his client list to The Washington Post: “Nearly 99.9 percent of my clients were black.”
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For black people, escaping poverty does not mean escaping a poor neighborhood
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The blacks incarcerated in this country are not like the majority of Americans. They do not merely hail from poor communities—they hail from communities that have been imperiled across both the deep and immediate past, and continue to be imperiled today. Peril is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the peril continues. Incarceration pushes you out of the job market. Incarceration disqualifies you from feeding your family with food stamps. Incarceration allows for housing discrimination based on a criminal-background check. Incarceration increases your risk of homelessness. Incarceration increases your chances of being incarcerated again. “The prison boom helps us understand how racial inequality in America was sustained, despite great optimism for the social progress of African Americans,” Bruce Western, the Harvard sociologist, writes. “The prison boom is not the main cause of inequality between blacks and whites in America, but it did foreclose upward mobility and deflate hopes for racial equality.”
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If generational peril is the pit in which all black people are born, incarceration is the trapdoor closing overhead.
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“The Negro Family” is a flawed work in part because it is a fundamentally sexist document that promotes the importance not just of family but of patriarchy, arguing that black men should be empowered at the expense of black women.
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they believed that Americans were capable of taking in critiques of black culture and white racism at once.
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Mass incarceration became the national model of social control. Indeed, while the Gray Wastes have expanded their population, their most significant characteristic remains unchanged: In 1900, the black-white incarceration disparity in the North was seven to one The historical numbers on mass incarceration come from Christopher Muller’s 2012 article, “Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarceration, 1880–1950.”—roughly the same disparity that exists today on a national scale.
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there is now broad agreement that the sprawling carceral state must be dismantled.
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If one purpose of prison is to protect the public, then high rates of life imprisonment make little sense, because offenders, including those convicted of violent crimes, tend to age out of crime.
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There is no reason to assume that a smaller correctional system inevitably means a more equitable correctional system.
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The lesson of Minnesota is that the chasm in incarceration rates is deeply tied to the socioeconomic chasm between black and white America.
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Mass incarceration is, ultimately, a problem of troublesome entanglements. To war seriously against the disparity in unfreedom requires a war against a disparity in resources. And to war against a disparity in resources is to confront a history in which both the plunder and the mass incarceration of blacks are accepted commonplaces. Our current debate over criminal-justice reform pretends that it is possible to disentangle ourselves without significantly disturbing the other aspects of our lives, that one can extract the thread of mass incarceration from the larger tapestry of racist American policy.
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And so it is not possible to truly reform our justice system without reforming the institutional structures, the communities, and the politics that surround it. Robert Sampson argues for “affirmative action for neighborhoods”—reform that would target investment in both persistently poor neighborhoods and the poor individuals living in those neighborhoods.
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31 Mar 16
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22 Feb 16
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15 Feb 16
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10 Feb 16
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the product of a broken home and a pathological family
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his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty
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Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol.
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Both my mother and father—They let me down badly
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the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”
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be mistaken for any sissy kid.
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he enlisted in the Navy,
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Moynihan was, by then, an anticommunist liberal with a strong belief in the power of government to both study and solve social problems.
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he was possessed by “the optimism of youth.” He believed in the marriage of government and social science to formulate policy. “All manner of later experiences in politics were to test this youthful faith.”
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became increasingly disillusioned with Johnson’s War on Poverty. He believed that the initiative should be run through an established societal institution: the patriarchal family
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Fathers should be supported by public policy, in the form of jobs funded by the government
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unemployment, specifically male unemployment, was the biggest impediment to the social mobility of the poor.
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He was, it might be said, a
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conservative radical who disdained service programs such as Head Start and traditional welfare programs such as Aid to Families With Dependent Children, and instead imagined a broad national program that subsidized families through jobs programs for men and a guaranteed minimum income for every family.
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promoted a guaranteed minimum income for all families, in part to help unravel the “tangle of pathology” he had famously diagnosed in his report on “The Negro Family.” August 25, 1969. (Associated Press)
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a deficit of employed black men of strong character. He believed that this deficit went a long way toward explaining the African American community’s relative poverty
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it was meant to be an internal government document,
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he federal government was underestimating the damage done to black families by “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment” as well as a “racist virus in the American blood stream,”
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That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have
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battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble
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Out-of-wedlock births were on the rise, and with them, welfare dependency, while the unemployment rate among black men remained high.
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many more are falling further and further behind.
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the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.
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his matriarchal structure robbed black men of their birthright
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most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped. Many of those who escape do so for one generation only:
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That is not the least vicious aspect of the world that white America has made for the Negro.
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28 Jan 16
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The Gray Wastes—our carceral state, a sprawling netherworld of prisons and jails—are a relatively recent invention.
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“the current U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards.”
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What caused this?
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15 Jan 16
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08 Jan 16
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04 Jan 16
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30 Dec 15sbluemle
by Ta-Nehisi Coates. "A serious reformation of our carceral policy—one seeking a smaller prison population, and a prison population that looks more like America—cannot concern itself merely with sentencing reform, cannot pretend as though the past 50 years of criminal-justice policy did not do real damage. And so it is not possible to truly reform our justice system without reforming the institutional structures, the communities, and the politics that surround it."
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27 Dec 15
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16 Dec 15
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12 Dec 15
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10 Dec 15icavcu
The Atlantic: 50 Years After the Moynihan Report
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01 Dec 15
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subsidized families through jobs programs for men and a guaranteed minimum income for every family.
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a deficit of employed black men of strong character
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matriarchal structure
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05 Nov 15
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28 Oct 15
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jordendavis
follow up on the moynihan reprot
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12 Oct 15
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06 Oct 15
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05 Oct 15Paulina Haduong
Never marry again in slavery. Wherever the law is, crime can be found. via Pocket
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04 Oct 15
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The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants.
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America’s closest to-scale competitor is Russia—and with an autocratic Vladimir Putin locking up about 450 people per 100,000, compared with our 700 or so, it isn’t much of a competition. China has about four times America’s population, but American jails and prisons hold half a million more people. “In short,” an authoritative report issued last year by the National Research Council concluded, “the current U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards.”
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Employment and poverty statistics traditionally omit the incarcerated from the official numbers.
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The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one. “High levels of incarceration cast a shadow of criminality over all black men
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A tough veneer that precludes seeking help for personal problems, the generalized mistrust that comes from the fear of exploitation, and a tendency to strike out in response to minimal provocations are highly functional in many prison contexts but problematic virtually everywhere else.
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Blacks who could not find work were labeled vagrants and sent to jail, where they were leased as labor to the very people who had once enslaved them. Vagrancy laws were nominally color-blind but, Kennedy writes, “applied principally, if not exclusively, against Negroes.”
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stop-and-frisk
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police officers could stop pedestrians on vague premises such as “furtive movements” and then question them and search them for guns and drugs. Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University law professor, found that blacks and Hispanics were stopped significantly more often than whites even “after adjusting stop rates for the precinct crime rates” and “other social and economic factors predictive of police activity.” Despite Giuliani’s claim that aggressive policing is justified because blacks are “killing each other,” Fagan found that between 2004 and 2009, officers recovered weapons in less than 1 percent of all stops—and recovered them more frequently from whites than from blacks. Yet blacks were 14 percent more likely to be subjected to force. In 2013 the policy, as carried out under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg, was ruled unconstitutional.
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small, cash-strapped municipalities in the St. Louis suburbs were deriving 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from various fines for traffic violations, loud music, uncut grass, and wearing “saggy pants,” among other infractions.
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The lesson of Minnesota is that the chasm in incarceration rates is deeply tied to the socioeconomic chasm between black and white America. The two are self-reinforcing—impoverished black people are more likely to end up in prison, and that experience breeds impoverishment.
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03 Oct 15
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30 Sep 15
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Family breakdown “flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.”
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Among all black males born since the late 1970s, one in four went to prison by their mid-‘30s; among those who dropped out of high school, seven in 10 did
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“Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups,” Devah Pager, a sociologist at Harvard, has written.
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“Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.”
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“More than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary breadwinner in their family,” the National Research Council report noted. Should the family attempt to stay together through incarceration, the loss of income only increases, as the mother must pay for phone time, travel costs for visits, and legal fees.
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20 Sep 15
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18 Sep 15
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Michael Rackett
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, Oct 2015
Nine-chapter series. -
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol
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Fathers should be supported by public policy, in the form of jobs funded by the government
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Moynihan believed that unemployment, specifically male unemployment, was the biggest impediment to the social mobility of the poor.
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a conservative radical who disdained service programs such as Head Start and traditional welfare programs
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a deficit of employed black men of strong character
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went a long way toward explaining the African American community’s relative poverty
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“The Negro Family” argued that the federal government was underestimating the damage done to black families by “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment” as well as a “racist virus in the American blood stream,” which would continue to plague blacks in the future:
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In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.
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“the breakdown of the Negro family structure.” Johnson left no doubt about how this breakdown had come about. In the quest to understand the politics around the Moynihan Report, and how it was written, Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey’s investigation, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy proved key. It has the advantage of being both well-researched and contemporaneous—the book was published two years after the Moynihan Report. It was a rich source of primary documents, collecting the responses to the report for and against around the time of publication. “For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility,”
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The press did not generally greet Johnson’s speech as a claim of white responsibility, but rather as a condemnation of “the failure of Negro family life,”
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James Farmer, the civil-rights activist and a co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, attacked the report from the left as “a massive academic cop-out for the white conscience.”
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the controversy transformed Moynihan into one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of his era.
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He began pushing for a minimum income for all American families.
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The Gray Wastes—our carceral state, a sprawling netherworld of prisons and jails—are a relatively recent invention.
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America’s closest to-scale competitor is Russia—and with an autocratic Vladimir Putin locking up about 450 people per 100,000, compared with our 700 or so, it isn’t much of a competition.
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China has about four times America’s population, but American jails and prisons hold half a million more people.
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the current U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards.
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Between 1963 and 1993, the murder rate doubled, the robbery rate quadrupled, and the aggravated-assault rate nearly quintupled.
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Imprisonment rates actually fell from the 1960s through the early ’70s, even as violent crime increased. From the mid-’70s to the late ’80s, both imprisonment rates and violent-crime rates rose. Then, from the early ’90s to the present, violent-crime rates fell while imprisonment rates increased.
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The incarceration rate rose independent of crime—but not of criminal-justice policy.
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The rise and fall in crime in the late 20th century was an international phenomenon. Crime rates rose and fell in the United States and Canada at roughly the same clip—but in Canada, imprisonment rates held steady. “If greatly increased severity of punishment and higher imprisonment rates caused American crime rates to fall after 1990,” the researchers Michael Tonry and David P. Farrington have written, then “what caused the Canadian rates to fall?”
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66 percent increase in the state prison population between 1993 and 2001 had reduced the rate of serious crime by a modest 2 to 5 percent—at a cost to taxpayers of $53 billion.
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This bloating of the prison population may not have reduced crime much, but it increased misery among the group that so concerned Moynihan.
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The emergence of the carceral state has had far-reaching consequences for the economic viability of black families.
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Even in the booming ’90s, when nearly every American demographic group improved its economic position, black men were left out.
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By 2000, more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison—and roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids when they were locked up.
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More than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary breadwinner in their family
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The Gray Wastes differ in both size and mission from the penal systems of earlier eras.
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1970s, rehabilitation was largely abandoned in favor of retribution
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in the 1990s, South Carolina cut back on in-prison education, banned air conditioners, jettisoned televisions, and discontinued intramural sports
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Michigan, with an incarceration rate of 628 people per 100,000, is about average for an American state.
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Violence, for her, commenced not in the streets, but at home. “There was abuse in my grandmother’s home, and I went to school and I told my teacher,” she explained. “I had a spot on my nose because I had a lit cigarette stuck on my nose, and when I told her, they sent me to a temporary foster-care home … The foster parent was also abusive, so I just ran away from her and just stayed on the streets.”
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Tonya began using crack. One night she gathered with some friends for a party. They smoked crack. They smoked marijuana. They drank. At some point, the woman hosting the party claimed that someone had stolen money from her home. Another woman accused Tonya of stealing it. A fight ensued. Tonya shot the woman who had accused her. She got 20 years for the murder and two for the gun. After the trial, the truth came out. The host had hidden the money, but was so high that she’d forgotten.
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“First I would get one [visit] like every four months,” Tonya explained to me. “And then I wouldn’t get none for like maybe a year. You know, because it was too far away. And I started to have losses. I lost my mom, my brothers … So it was hard, you know, for me to get visits.”
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As the visits and phone calls diminish, the incarcerated begins to adjust to the fact that he or she is, indeed, a prisoner. New social ties are cultivated. New rules must be understood. A blizzard of acronyms, sayings, and jargon—PBF, CSC, ERD, “letters but no numbers”—must be comprehended. If the prisoner is lucky, someone—a cell mate, an older prisoner hailing from the same neighborhood—takes him under his wing. This can be the difference between survival and catastrophe.
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“It’s hard to stay ticket-free for 10 years without somebody getting stabbed, somebody getting into a fight,”
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a prisoner can decide either to defend himself or to “lock up”—that is, to report to the guards that he fears for his safety. The guards will then place the prisoner in solitary confinement for his own protection. “Those are my only two choices,” Braceful explained. “And if you lock up, everybody know you lock up. When you come back out, you gonna have a bigger problem.”
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Michigan leads the country in the average length of a prison stay—4.3 years—yet most prisoners do eventually say goodbye.
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challenge of staying free
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I was only used to a cell as opposed to having multiple rooms, and there was always somebody there with me in the cell
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I stayed on the phone. I made people call me, you know. It was scary. And I still experience that to this day. Everybody looks suspect to me. I’m like, ‘He’s up to something.’ A friend of mine told me, ‘You’ve been gone a long time, over a decade, so it’s gonna take you about two years for you to readjust.’ ”
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re-acculturation is essential to thriving in an already compromised job market
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In America, the men and women who find themselves lost in the Gray Wastes are not picked at random.
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Roughly half of today’s prison inmates are functionally illiterate
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Four out of five criminal defendants qualify as indigent before the courts
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Sixty-eight percent of jail inmates were struggling with substance dependence or abuse in 2002
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As the number of prison beds has risen in this country, the number of public-psychiatric-hospital beds has fallen.
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The Gray Wastes draw from the most socioeconomically unfortunate among us, and thus take particular interest in those who are black.
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It is impossible to conceive of the Gray Wastes without first conceiving of a large swath of its inhabitants as both more than criminal and less than human.
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preeminent outlaws
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Black criminality is literally written into the American Constitution—the Fugitive Slave Clause, in Article IV of that document, declared that any “Person held to Service or Labour” who escaped from one state to another could be “delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”
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From America’s very founding, the pursuit of the right to labor, and the right to live free of whipping and of the sale of one’s children, were verboten for blacks.
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To fortify the “republican edifice,” acts considered legal when committed by whites were judged criminal when committed by blacks.
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many jurisdictions made slaves into ‘criminals’ by prohibiting them from pursuing a wide range of activities that whites were typically free to pursue
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The end of enslavement posed an existential crisis for white supremacy, because an open labor market meant blacks competing with whites for jobs and resources, and—most frightening—black men competing for the attention of white women.
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Postbellum Alabama solved this problem by manufacturing criminals. Blacks who could not find work were labeled vagrants and sent to jail, where they were leased as labor to the very people who had once enslaved them.
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“From the 1890s through the first four decades of the twentieth century,” writes Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, “black criminality would become one of the most commonly cited and longest-lasting justifications for black inequality and mortality in the modern urban world.”
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Rape, according to the mythology of the day, remained the crime of choice for blacks.
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Before Emancipation, enslaved blacks were rarely lynched, because whites were loathe to destroy their own property.
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The lethal wave was justified by a familiar archetype—“the shadow of the Negro criminal,” which, according to John Rankin, a congressman from Mississippi speaking in 1922, hung “like the sword of Damocles over the head of every white woman.”
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1897 lecture, W. E. B. Du Bois declared, “The first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races—commonly called the Negro problem—lies in the correction of the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slavery.”
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Kelly Miller, who was then a leading black intellectual and a professor at Howard University, presaged the call for blacks to be “twice as good,” asserting in 1899 that it was not enough for “ninety-five out of every hundred Negroes” to be lawful. “The ninety-five must band themselves together to restrain or suppress the vicious five.”
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Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine. The reasoning was unoriginal. “The use of cocaine by unfortunate women generally and by negroes in certain parts of the country is simply appalling,”
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In Douglass’s time, to stand up for black rights was to condone black criminality. The same was true in King’s time. The same is true today.
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Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs
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some small, cash-strapped municipalities in the St. Louis suburbs were deriving 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from various fines for traffic violations, loud music, uncut grass, and wearing “saggy pants,” among other infractions
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It is patently true that black communities, home to a class of people regularly discriminated against and impoverished, have long suffered higher crime rates.
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Crime within the black community was primarily seen as a black problem, and became a societal problem mainly when it seemed to threaten the white population.
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The principal source of the intensifying war on crime was white anxiety about social control.
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The American response to crime cannot be divorced from a history of equating black struggle—individual and collective—with black villainy.
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Nixon’s war on crime was more rhetoric than substance.
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Indeed, if sinking crime rates are the measure of success, Nixon’s war on crime was a dismal failure. The rate of every type of violent crime—murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault—was up by the end of Nixon’s tenure. The true target of Nixon’s war on crime lay elsewhere.
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According to H. R. Haldeman, another Nixon aide, the president believed that when it came to welfare, the “whole problem [was] really the blacks.”
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“The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to,”
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As incarceration rates rose and prison terms became longer, the idea of rehabilitation was mostly abandoned in favor of incapacitation.
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Conservatives believed mandatory sentencing would prevent judges from exercising too much leniency; liberals believed it would prevent racism from infecting the bench.
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cut back on alternatives
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Before reform, prisoners typically served 40 to 70 percent of their sentences. After reform, they served 87 to 100 percent of their sentences.
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bias was not eliminated, because discretion now lay with prosecutors, who could determine the length of a sentence by deciding what crimes to charge someone with.
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“We cannot ignore the fact that when we talk about drug abuse in our country, in the main, we are talking about the consequence it has for young males in inner cities,”
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not true of actual drug abuse
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Surveys have repeatedly shown that blacks and whites use drugs at remarkably comparable rates.
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Gone was any talk of root causes; in its place was something darker. The young inner-city males who had so concerned Moynihan led “wasted and ruined” lives and constituted a threat that could “bring about the destruction of whole communities and cities across this Nation.”
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James Q. Wilson, the noted social scientist and a co-creator of the “broken windows” theory of policing, retreated to abstract moralizing and tautology. “Drug use is wrong because it is immoral,” he claimed, “and it is immoral because it enslaves the mind and destroys the soul.”
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In 1996, William J. Bennett, John P. Walters, and John J. DiIulio Jr. partnered to publish perhaps the most infamous tract of the tough-on-crime era, Body Count: Moral Poverty … and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs. The authors (wrongly) predicted a new crime wave driven by “inner-city children” who were growing up “almost completely unmoralized and develop[ing] character traits” that would “lead them into a life of illiteracy, illicit drugs, and violent crimes.”
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“No one can say I’m soft on crime.” In 1994, Bill Clinton signed a bill that offered grants to states that built prisons and cut back on parole, driving up the nation’s incarceration numbers. He now says he regrets doing that. (Doug Mills/AP)
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Jesse Jackson confessed, in 1993, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved,”
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The argument that high crime is the predictable result of a series of oppressive racist policies does not render the victims of those policies bulletproof.
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Likewise, noting that fear of crime is well grounded does not make that fear a solid foundation for public policy.
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The suite of drug laws adopted in the 1980s and ’90s did little to reduce crime, but a lot to normalize prison in black communities.
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By the mid-’90s, both political parties had come to endorse arrest and incarceration as a primary tool of crime-fighting.
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In 1993, Texas rejected a bid to infuse its schools with $750 million—but approved $1 billion to build more prisons.
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In New York, another liberal governor, Mario Cuomo, found himself facing an exploding prison population. After voters rejected funding for more prisons, Cuomo pulled the money from the Urban Development Corporation, an agency that was supposed to build public housing for the poor. It did—in prison. Under the avowedly liberal Cuomo, New York added more prison beds than under all his predecessors combined.
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penal welfarism at its finest
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Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks.
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Some 600,000 inmates are released from America’s prisons each year, more than the entire population of America’s prisons in 1970—enough people, according to Pager, to “fill every one of the fast-food job openings created annually nearly five times over.”
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Like the bestial blacks of the 19th century, super-predators proved to be the stuff of myth.
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Clinton recently said that he regrets his pivotal role in driving up the country’s incarceration numbers. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse,” he told the NAACP in July. “And I want to admit it.”
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Clinton neglected to retract the assumption underlying them—that incarcerating large swaths of one population was a purely well-intended, logical, and nonracist response to crime.
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Fifteen percent of Maryland’s lifers committed their crimes as juveniles—the largest percentage in the nation, according to a 2015 report by the Maryland Restorative Justice Initiative and the state’s ACLU affiliate. The vast majority of them—84 percent—are black.
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financial expense of having a loved one incarcerated
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lawyers
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long drives to prisons that are commonly built in rural white regions
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phone calls, and of constantly restocking an inmate’s commissary
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emotional weight
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Whereas inmates had once done their time and gone to pre-release facilities, now they were staying longer. Requirements for release became more onerous. Meanwhile, the prisons were filling to capacity and beyond.
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The prisons began holding two people in cells meant for one.
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The overcrowding, the stripping of programs and resources, were part of the national movement toward punishing inmates more harshly and for longer periods.
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In Maryland, the average lifer who has been recommended for but not granted release is 60 years old. These men and women are past the age of “criminal menopause,” as some put it, and most pose no threat to their community.
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Between 2006 and 2014, it recommended only about 80 out of more than 2,100 eligible lifers for release.
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Almost none of those 80 or so men and women, despite meeting a stringent set of requirements, was granted release by the governor.
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choice given to judges to levy sentences for life either with or without parole no longer has any meaning.
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Family leave was supposed to be a bridge to Odell’s eventual release. But the program was suspended for lifers in May of 1993, after a convicted murderer fled while visiting his son.
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Maryland ended work release for them as well
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Odell had the very bulwark that Moynihan treasured—a stable family—and it did not save him from incarceration.
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families don’t exist independent of their environment.
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government-backed housing discrimination
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Baltimore was a pioneer in this practice—in 1910, the city council had zoned the city by race
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These efforts curtailed the ability of black people to buy better housing, to move to better neighborhoods, and to build wealth.
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racial zoning condemned black people to the oldest and worst housing in the city—the kind where one was more likely to be exposed, as Odell Newton was, to lead
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A lawyer who handled more than 4,000 lead-poisoning cases across three decades recently described his client list to The Washington Post: “Nearly 99.9 percent of my clients were black.”
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High rates of incarceration, single-parent households, dropping out of school, and poverty are not unrelated vectors. Instead, taken together, they constitute what Sampson calls “compounded deprivation”—entire families, entire neighborhoods, deprived in myriad ways, must navigate, all at once, a tangle of interrelated and reinforcing perils.
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Black people face this tangle of perils at its densest.
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Unsurprisingly, they found that blacks tend to be individually poor and to live in poor neighborhoods.
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For black people, escaping poverty does not mean escaping a poor neighborhood.
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“It’s not just being poor; it’s discrimination in the housing market, it’s subprime loans, it’s drug addiction—and then all of that following you over time,”
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Carl S. Taylor
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Yusef Bunchy Shakur
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Shakur is a community activist and the author of two books chronicling his road to prison, his experience inside, and his return to society.
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Taylor is a sociologist at Michigan State University, where he researches urban communities and violence and serves as an adviser to Michigan’s prisons and juvenile detention centers.
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Shakur, who is 42, recalls a town ravaged by deindustrialization, where unemployment was rampant, social institutions had failed, and gangs had taken their place.
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Taylor, who is 66, recalls a more hopeful community where black professionals lived next door to black factory workers and black maids and black gangsters, and the streets were packed with bars, factories, and restaurants.
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It is a matter of some irony that the time period and the communities Taylor was describing with fond nostalgia are the same ones that so alarmed Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965.
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Like so many urban riots during the long, hot summers of the 1960s, Detroit’s began with law enforcement. On July 23, 1967, the Detroit police raided an after-hours watering hole on the West Side. For several days, the city’s black communities burned. As in other cities, the riot demarcated the end of “the good life.”
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Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at New York University, observes in his book The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, “Between 1947 and 1963, Detroit lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs, while its population of working-aged men and women actually increased.”
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By the late 1950s,” Sugrue writes, Detroit’s “industrial landscape had become almost unrecognizable.”
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Within a precarious economy, black people generally worked the lowest-paying jobs. They came home from those jobs to the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where most of them used their substandard wages to pay inflated prices for inferior housing.
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The blacks incarcerated in this country are not like the majority of Americans. They do not merely hail from poor communities—they hail from communities that have been imperiled across both the deep and immediate past, and continue to be imperiled today.
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Incarceration disqualifies you from feeding your family with food stamps. Incarceration allows for housing discrimination based on a criminal-background check. Incarceration increases your risk of homelessness. Incarceration increases your chances of being incarcerated again.
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The prison boom helps us understand how racial inequality in America was sustained, despite great optimism for the social progress of African Americans
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If generational peril is the pit in which all black people are born, incarceration is the trapdoor closing overhead.
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The compounded deprivation that African Americans experience is a challenge even independent of all the characteristics we think are protective.
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A raft of sociological research has indeed borne out Moynihan’s skepticism about black progress, as well as his warnings about the kind of concentrated poverty that flowed from segregation.
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Moynihan’s observation about the insufficiency of civil-rights legislation has been proved largely correct. This seems like the right place to thank Peter-Christian Aigner, who is working on a biography of Moynihan. While Peter doesn’t yet have a book for me to cite, his insights on Moynihan were crucial in guiding me to sources and thinking about the context for “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” Moreover, Moynihan’s concern about the declining rates of two-parent households would have struck the average black resident of Harlem in 1965 as well placed. Nationalist leaders like Malcolm X drew much of their appeal through their calls for shoring up the black family.
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“The Negro Family” is a flawed work in part because it is a fundamentally sexist document that promotes the importance not just of family but of patriarchy, arguing that black men should be empowered at the expense of black women. “Men must have jobs,”
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Even if we have to displace some females.”
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Moynihan fed Nixon’s antipathies—against elites, college students, and blacks—and stoked the president’s fears about crime. In a memo to Nixon, he asserted that “a great deal of the crime” in the black community was really a manifestation of anti-white racism: “Hatred—revenge—against whites is now an acceptable excuse for doing what might have been done anyway.” Like his forebears who’d criminalized blacks, Moynihan claimed that education had done little to mollify the hatred. “It would be difficult to overestimate the degree to which young well educated blacks detest white America.”
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the Negro lower class would appear to be unusually self-damaging
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Do this or the cities will burn.
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What building contracts and police graft were to the 19th-century urban Irish, the welfare department, Head Start, and Black Studies programs will be to the coming generation of Negroes. They are of course very wise in this respect.
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According to the Moynihan of the Nixon era, middle-class blacks were not hardworking Americans attempting to get ahead—they were mobsters demanding protection money in exchange for the safety of America’s cities.
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In their efforts to strengthen the black family, Clinton and Moynihan—and Obama, too—aspired to combine government social programs with cultural critiques of ghetto pathology (the “both/and” notion, as Obama has termed it), and they believed that Americans were capable of taking in critiques of black culture and white racism at once. But this underestimated the weight of the country’s history.
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For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm. Enslavement lasted for nearly 250 years. The 150 years that followed have encompassed debt peonage, convict lease-labor, and mass incarceration—a period that overlapped with Jim Crow.
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In his inaugural year as the governor of Texas, 1995, George W. Bush presided over a government that opened a new prison nearly every week. Under Bush, the state’s prison budget rose from $1.4 billion to $2.4 billion, and the total number of prison beds went from about 118,000 to more than 166,000. Almost a decade later Bush, by then the president of the United States, decided that he, and the rest of the country, had made a mistake.
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now broad agreement that the sprawling carceral state must be dismantled
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Koch Industries
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teaming up with the Center for American Progress
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in service of decarceration
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The changes needed to achieve an incarceration rate in line with the rest of the developed world are staggering.
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In 1972, the U.S. incarceration rate was 161 per 100,000—slightly higher than the English and Welsh incarceration rate today (148 per 100,000). To return to that 1972 level, America would have to cut its prison and jail population by some 80 percent. The popular notion that this can largely be accomplished by releasing nonviolent drug offenders is false—as of 2012, 54 percent of all inmates in state prisons had been sentenced for violent offenses.
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Marie Gottschalk
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recent book Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.
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often hard to tell a nonviolent offender from a violent offender
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One 2004 study found that the proportion of “unambiguously low-level drug offenders” could be less than 6 percent in state prisons and less than 2 percent in federal ones.
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what is the moral logic that allows forever banishing the Odell Newtons of America to the Gray Wastes?
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50 out of every 100,000 Americans are serving a life sentence—which is, Gottschalk notes, a rate “comparable to the incarceration rate for all prisoners, including pretrial detainees, in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries
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remains peculiarly American
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If one purpose of prison is to protect the public, then high rates of life imprisonment make little sense, because offenders, including those convicted of violent crimes, tend to age out of crime.
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The Gray Wastes are a moral abomination for reasons beyond the sheer number of their tenants.
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Richard S. Frase, a professor of criminal law at the University of Minnesota, found a state whose relatively sane justice policies give it one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country—and yet whose economic disparities give it one of the worst black-white incarceration ratios in the country.
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Changing criminal-justice policy did very little to change the fact that blacks committed crimes at a higher rate than whites in Minnesota.
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The black family poverty rate in Minnesota was over six times higher than the white poverty rate, whereas for the United States as a whole the black poverty rate was 3.4 times higher,
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The lesson of Minnesota is that the chasm in incarceration rates is deeply tied to the socioeconomic chasm between black and white America.
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impoverished black people are more likely to end up in prison, and that experience breeds impoverishment.
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To war seriously against the disparity in unfreedom requires a war against a disparity in resources. And to war against a disparity in resources is to confront a history in which both the plunder and the mass incarceration of blacks are accepted commonplaces.
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Blacks were suffering from the effects of centuries of ill treatment at the hands of white society. Ending that ill treatment would not be enough; the country would have to make amends for it.
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Robert Sampson argues for “affirmative action for neighborhoods”—reform that would target investment in both persistently poor neighborhoods and the poor individuals living in those neighborhoods.
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From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a modest decline to 707 people per 100,000 in 2012. In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million. The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers.
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The Gray Wastes—our carceral state, a sprawling netherworld of prisons and jails—are a relatively recent invention. Through the middle of the 20th century, America’s imprisonment rate hovered at about 110 people per 100,000. Presently, America’s incarceration rate (which accounts for people in prisons and jails) is roughly 12 times the rate in Sweden, eight times the rate in Italy, seven times the rate in Canada, five times the rate in Australia, and four times the rate in Poland. America’s closest to-scale competitor is Russia—and with an autocratic Vladimir Putin locking up about 450 people per 100,000, compared with our 700 or so, it isn’t much of a competition. China has about four times America’s population, but American jails and prisons hold half a million more people. “In short,” an authoritative report issued last year by the National Research Council concluded, “the current U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards.
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What caused this? Crime would seem the obvious culprit: Between 1963 and 1993, the murder rate doubled, the robbery rate quadrupled, and the aggravated-assault rate nearly quintupled. But the relationship between crime and incarceration is more discordant than it appears. Imprisonment rates actually fell from the 1960s through the early ’70s, even as violent crime increased. From the mid-’70s to the late ’80s, both imprisonment rates and violent-crime rates rose. Then, from the early ’90s to the present, violent-crime rates fell while imprisonment rates increased.
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Derek Neal, an economist at the University of Chicago, has found that by the early 2000s, a suite of tough-on-crime laws had made prison sentences much more likely than in the past. Examining a sample of states, Neal found that from 1985 to 2000, the likelihood of a long prison sentence nearly doubled for drug possession, tripled for drug trafficking, and quintupled for nonaggravated assault.
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Among all black males born since the late 1970s, one in four went to prison by their mid-‘30s; among those who dropped out of high school, seven in 10 did. “Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups,” Devah Pager, a sociologist at Harvard, has written. “Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.”
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By 2000, more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison—and roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids when they were locked up. Paternal incarceration is associated with behavior problems and delinquency, especially among boys.
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“More than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary breadwinner in their family,” the National Research Council report noted. Should the family attempt to stay together through incarceration, the loss of income only increases, as the mother must pay for phone time, travel costs for visits, and legal fees. The burden continues after the father returns home, because a criminal record tends to injure employment prospects. For more the National Research Council’s The Growth of Incarceration in the United States is really an atlas of the Gray Wastes. Written by a committee of some of the most distinguished scholars on the subject, the report addresses any question you could possibly have about mass incarceration. You can read it straight through. But it works just as well as an encyclopedia. Through it all, the children suffer.
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Many fathers simply fall through the cracks after they’re released. It is estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of all parolees in Los Angeles and San Francisco are homeless. In that context—employment prospects diminished, cut off from one’s children, nowhere to live—one can readily see the difficulty of eluding the ever-present grasp of incarceration, even once an individual is physically out of prison. Many do not elude its grasp. In 1984, 70 percent of all parolees successfully completed their term without arrest and were granted full freedom. In 1996, only 44 percent did. As of 2013, 33 percent do.
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The incarcerated attempt to hold on to family and old social ties through phone calls and visitations. At first, friends and family do their best to keep up. But phone calls to prison are expensive, and many prisons are located far from one’s hometown.
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“First I would get one [visit] like every four months,” Tonya explained to me. “And then I wouldn’t get none for like maybe a year. You know, because it was too far away. And I started to have losses. I lost my mom, my brothers … So it was hard, you know, for me to get visits.”
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The challenges of housing and employment bedevil many ex-offenders. “It’s very common for them to go homeless,” Linda VanderWaal, the associate director of prisoner reentry at a community-action agency in Michigan, told me. In the winter, VanderWaal says, she has a particularly hard time finding places to accommodate all the homeless ex-prisoners. Those who do find a place to live often find it difficult to pay their rent.
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Ex-offenders are excluded from a wide variety of jobs, running the gamut from septic-tank cleaner to barber to real-estate agent, depending on the state.
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17 Sep 15
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16 Sep 15
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The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers.
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At a cost of $80 billion a year, American correctional facilities are a social-service program—providing health care, meals, and shelter for a whole class of people.
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As the civil-rights movement wound down, Moynihan looked out and saw a black population reeling under the effects of 350 years of bondage and plunder. He believed that these effects could be addressed through state action. They were—through the mass incarceration of millions of black people.
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“In short,” an authoritative report issued last year by the National Research Council concluded, “the current U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards.”
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Examining a sample of states, Neal found that from 1985 to 2000, the likelihood of a long prison sentence nearly doubled for drug possession, tripled for drug trafficking, and quintupled for nonaggravated assault.
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“Three Strikes and You’re Out” law
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determined in 2001 that the law had reduced the rate of felony crime by no more than 2 percent
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a 66 percent increase in the state prison population between 1993 and 2001 had reduced the rate of serious crime by a modest 2 to 5 percent—at a cost to taxpayers of $53 billion.
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This bloating of the prison population may not have reduced crime much, but it increased misery among the group that so concerned Moynihan. Among all black males born since the late 1970s, one in four went to prison by their mid-‘30s; among those who dropped out of high school, seven in 10 did. “Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups,” Devah Pager, a sociologist at Harvard, has written. “Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.”
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The emergence of the carceral state has had far-reaching consequences for the economic viability of black families.
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Even in the booming ’90s, when nearly every American demographic group improved its economic position, black men were left out. The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics.
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These consequences for black men have radiated out to their families. By 2000, more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison—and roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids when they were locked up. Paternal incarceration is associated with behavior problems and delinquency, especially among boys.
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“More than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary breadwinner in their family,” the National Research Council report noted.
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As African Americans began filling cells in the 1970s, rehabilitation was largely abandoned in favor of retribution—the idea that prison should not reform convicts but punish them.
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The carceral state has, in effect, become a credentialing institution as significant as the military, public schools, or universities—but the credentialing that prison or jail offers is negative.
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And in the limited job pool that ex-offenders can swim in, blacks and whites are not equal.
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The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one.
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“Roughly half of today’s prison inmates are functionally illiterate,”
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The Gray Wastes draw from the most socioeconomically unfortunate among us, and thus take particular interest in those who are black.
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Black criminality is literally written into the American Constitution—the Fugitive Slave Clause, in Article IV of that document, declared that any “Person held to Service or Labour” who escaped from one state to another could be “delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” From America’s very founding, the pursuit of the right to labor, and the right to live free of whipping and of the sale of one’s children, were verboten for blacks.
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Nearly a century and a half before the infamy of Willie Horton, a portrait emerged of blacks as highly prone to criminality, and generally beyond the scope of rehabilitation. In this fashion, black villainy justified white oppression
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Celia’s status—black, enslaved, female—transformed an act of self-defense into an act of villainy. Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard, writes that “many jurisdictions made slaves into ‘criminals’ by prohibiting them from pursuing a wide range of activities that whites were typically free to pursue.” Among these activities were:
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earning to read, leaving their masters’ property without a proper pass, engaging in “unbecoming” conduct in the presence of a white female, assembling to worship outside the supervisory presence of a white person, neglecting to step out of the way when a white person approached on a walkway, smoking in public, walking with a cane, making loud noises, or defending themselves from assaults.
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Antebellum Virginia had 73 crimes that could garner the death penalty for slaves—and only one for whites.
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The end of enslavement posed an existential crisis for white supremacy, because an open labor market meant blacks competing with whites for jobs and resources, and—most frightening—black men competing for the attention of white women. Postbellum Alabama solved this problem by manufacturing criminals. Blacks who could not find work were labeled vagrants and sent to jail, where they were leased as labor to the very people who had once enslaved them.
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Rape, according to the mythology of the day, remained the crime of choice for blacks.
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Before Emancipation, enslaved blacks were rarely lynched, because whites were loathe to destroy their own property. But after the Civil War, the number of lynchings rose
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not petering out entirely until the height of the civil-rights movement, in the 1960s.
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justified by a familiar archetype—“the shadow of the Negro criminal,” which, according to John Rankin, a congressman from Mississippi speaking in 1922, hung “like the sword of Damocles over the head of every white woman.”
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In this climate of white repression and paralyzed black leadership, the federal government launched, in 1914, its first war on drugsWhen people discuss the drug war, they are usually referring to the one that began in the 1970s, without realizing that this was, at least, our third drug war in the 20th century. I found David F. Musto’s The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control to be extremely helpful on the subject. It was depressing to see that drug wars, in this country, are almost never launched purely out of concern for public health. In almost every instance that Musto looks at there is some fear of an outsider—blacks and cocaine, Mexican-Americans and marijuana, Chinese-Americans and opium. I feel compelled to also mention Kathleen J. Frydl’s book The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973. It was on my list, but unfortunately, I didn’t get to it. At any rate, I have great respect for Frydl’s work and look forward to reading it in the future., passing the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the sale of opiates and cocaine. The reasoning was unoriginal. “The use of cocaine by unfortunate women generally and by negroes in certain parts of the country is simply appalling,” the American Pharmaceutical Association’s Committee on the Acquirement of the Drug Habit had concluded in 1902.
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Another physician, Hamilton Wright, the “father of American narcotic law,”
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“It has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the negroes of the South and other sections of the country.”
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J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI for nearly half a century, harassed three generations of leaders. In 1919, he attacked the black nationalist Marcus Garvey
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In 1964, he attacked Martin Luther King Jr.
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the Black Panther Party
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culminated in the assassination of Fred Hampton in December of 1969.
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In Douglass’s time, to stand up for black rights was to condone black criminality. The same was true in King’s time. The same is true today.
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Rudy Giuliani
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“How about you reduce crime? … The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70 to 75 percent of the time.”
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Giuliani’s claim that aggressive policing is justified because blacks are “killing each other,”
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In 2013 the policy, as carried out under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg, was ruled unconstitutional.
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“Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,”
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some small, cash-strapped municipalities in the St. Louis suburbs were deriving 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from various fines for traffic violations, loud music, uncut grass, and wearing “saggy pants,” among other infractions. This was not public safety driving policy—it was law enforcement tasked with the job of municipal plunder.
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“Law-abiding Negroes point out that there are criminal and treacherous Negroes who secure immunity from punishment because they are fawning and submissive toward whites,” observed the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal
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“Such persons are a danger to the Negro community. Leniency toward Negro defendants in cases involving crimes against other Negroes is thus actually a form of discrimination.”
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Crime within the black community was primarily seen as a black problem, and became a societal problem mainly when it seemed to threaten the white population.
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Take the case of New Orleans between the world wars
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Louisiana district attorneys promised that “Negro slayers of Negroes will be thoroughly prosecuted.” A common tool in homicide cases was to threaten black suspects with capital punishment to extract a guilty plea, which mandated a life sentence.
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At Angola State Penal Farm, the “white population rose by 39 percent while the African American inmate population increased by 143 percent.”
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“At no time in the history of our State,” the city’s district attorney claimed in 1935 This account of mass incarceration in Louisiana is drawn from Jeffrey S. Adler’s article “Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early-Twentieth-Century America.” Again, this is a case where things we take to be completely new, are not. One can not help but note the precedent to cries against “Black on Black crime” in the district attorney vowing to crack down on “Negro slayers of Negroes.”, “has White Supremacy been in greater danger.”
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The staggering rise in incarceration rates in interwar Louisiana coincided with a sense among whites that the old order was under siege. In the coming decades, this phenomenon would be replicated on a massive, national scale.
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Basil Whitener, a North Carolina congressman, dismissed the NAACP as an organization pledged to “the assistance of Negro criminals.”
In 1966, Richard Nixon picked up the charge, linking rising crime rates to Martin Luther King’s campaign of civil disobedience.
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as Nixon saw it
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“Doubling the conviction rate in this country would do far more to cure crime in America than quadrupling the funds for [the] War on Poverty,” he said in 1968.
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Nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman later wrote, “We’ll go after the racists … That subliminal appeal to the antiblack voter was always in Nixon’s statements and speeches on schools and housing.”
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According to H. R. Haldeman
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when it came to welfare, the “whole problem [was] really the blacks.”
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Mandatory minimums—sentences that set a minimum length of punishment for the convicted—were a bipartisan achievement of the 1980s backed not just by conservatives such as Strom Thurmond but by liberals such as Ted Kennedy.
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“We cannot ignore the fact that when we talk about drug abuse in our country, in the main, we are talking about the consequence it has for young males in inner cities,”
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Surveys have repeatedly shown that blacks and whites use drugs at remarkably comparable rates. Moynihan had by the late Reagan era evidently come to believe the worst distortions of his own 1965 report.
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James Q. Wilson, the noted social scientist and a co-creator of the “broken windows” theory of policing, retreated to abstract moralizing and tautology. “Drug use is wrong because it is immoral,” he claimed, “and it is immoral because it enslaves the mind and destroys the soul.”
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“A bio-underclass, a generation of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.” In this way, “the crime-stained blackness of the Negro” lived on to haunt white America.
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In 1996, William J. Bennett, John P. Walters, and John J. DiIulio Jr
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(wrongly) predicted a new crime wave driven by “inner-city children” who were growing up “almost completely unmoralized and develop[ing] character traits” that would “lead them into a life of illiteracy, illicit drugs, and violent crimes.” The threat to America from what the authors called “super-predators” was existential. “As high as America’s body count is today, a rising tide of youth crime and violence is about to lift it even higher,” the authors warned. “A new generation of street criminals is upon us—the youngest, biggest, and baddest generation any society has ever known.” Incarceration was “a solution,” DiIulio wrote in The New York Times, “and a highly cost-effective one.” The country agreed. For the next decade, incarceration rates shot up even further. The justification for resorting to incarceration was the same in 1996 as it was in 1896.
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The argument that high crime is the predictable result of a series of oppressive racist policies does not render the victims of those policies bulletproof. Likewise, noting that fear of crime is well grounded does not make that fear a solid foundation for public policy.
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To reiterate an important point: Surveys have concluded that blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates. And yet by the close of the 20th century, prison was a more common experience for young black men than college graduation or military service.
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Joe Biden
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quickly became the point man for showing that Democrats would not go soft on criminals. “One of my objectives, quite frankly,” he said, “is to lock Willie Horton up in jail.” Biden cast Democrats as the true party without mercy. “Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” he said in 1994. “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties … The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties … The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.”
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In 1993, Texas rejected a bid to infuse its schools with $750 million—but approved $1 billion to build more prisons.
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After voters rejected funding for more prisons, Cuomo pulled the money from the Urban Development Corporation, an agency that was supposed to build public housing for the poor. It did—in prison. Under the avowedly liberal Cuomo, New York added more prison beds than under all his predecessors combined.
This was penal welfarism at its finest. Deindustrialization had presented an employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races. Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks.
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Dark predictions of rising crime did not bear out. Like the bestial blacks of the 19th century, super-predators proved to be the stuff of myth. This realization cannot be regarded strictly as a matter of hindsight. As the historian Naomi Murakawa has shown
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many Democrats knew exactly what they were doing—playing on fear for political gain—and did it anyway.
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In 1994, President Clinton signed a new crime bill, which offered grants to states that built prisons and cut back on parole.
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In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that life sentences without the possibility of parole for juveniles found guilty of crimes other than homicide were unconstitutional. Two years later, it held the same for mandatory life sentences without parole for juvenile homicide offenders. But the Court has yet to rule on whether that more recent decision was retroactive. Fifteen percent of Maryland’s lifers committed their crimes as juveniles
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The vast majority of them—84 percent—are black.
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In 2006, Martin O’Malley
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took an even stricter stance on lifers than his predecessor,
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Odell was born in the midst of an era of government-backed housing discrimination. Indeed, Baltimore was a pioneer in this practice—in 1910, the city council had zoned the city by race. “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums,”
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High rates of incarceration, single-parent households, dropping out of school, and poverty are not unrelated vectors. Instead, taken together, they constitute what Sampson calls “compounded deprivation”—entire families, entire neighborhoods, deprived in myriad ways, must navigate, all at once, a tangle of interrelated and reinforcing perils.
Black people face this tangle of perils at its densest.
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“It’s not just being poor; it’s discrimination in the housing market, it’s subprime loans, it’s drug addiction—and then all of that following you over time,”
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lack residents of Detroit had to cope not just with the same structural problems as white residents but also with pervasive racism.
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Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and father—They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes—of whom the least rejection was cause for untold agonies—the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”
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In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million. The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants.
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Crime rates rose and fell in the United States and Canada at roughly the same clip—but in Canada, imprisonment rates held steady. “If greatly increased severity of punishment and higher imprisonment rates caused American crime rates to fall after 1990,” the researchers Michael Tonry and David P. Farrington have written, then “what caused the Canadian rates to fall?”
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Among all black males born since the late 1970s, one in four went to prison by their mid-‘30s; among those who dropped out of high school, seven in 10 did.
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When Western recalculated the jobless rates for the year 2000 to include incarcerated young black men, he found that joblessness among all young black men went from 24 to 32 percent; among those who never went to college, it went from 30 to 42 percent
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I’ve never talked with a doctor until he be sewing me up after I got shot. I never talked with a lawyer until he was sending me to prison. I never talked with a judge until he convicted me.”
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then high rates of life imprisonment make little sense, because offenders, including those convicted of violent crimes, tend to age out of crime
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the chasm in incarceration rates is deeply tied to the socioeconomic chasm between black and white America. The two are self-reinforcing—impoverished black people are more likely to end up in prison, and that experience breeds impoverishment
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sdlang72
.@tanehisicoates's cover story in @TheAtlantic draws on @hthompsn's 2010 JAH piece "Why Mass Incarceration Matters": http://t.co/qsS8vXeLu4
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15 Sep 15
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“The Negro Family” argued that the federal government was underestimating the damage done to black families by “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment” as well as a “racist virus in the American blood stream,” which would continue to plague blacks in the future:
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“For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility,” Johnson said. Family breakdown “flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.”
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People who read the newspapers but were not able to read the report could—and did—conclude that Johnson was conceding that no government effort could match the “tangle of pathology” that Moynihan had said beset the black family. Moynihan’s aim in writing “The Negro Family” had been to muster support for an all-out government assault on the structural social problems that held black families down. (“Family as an issue raised the possibility of enlisting the support of conservative groups for quite radical social programs,” he would later write.) Instead his report was portrayed as an argument for leaving the black family to fend for itself.
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Moynihan himself was partly to blame for this. In its bombastic language, its omission of policy recommendations, its implication that black women were obstacles to black men’s assuming their proper station, and its unnecessarily covert handling, the Moynihan Report militated against its author’s aims. James Farmer, the civil-rights activist and a co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, attacked the report from the left as “a massive academic cop-out for the white conscience.” William Ryan, the psychologist who first articulated the concept of “blaming the victim,” accused Moynihan’s report of doing just that.
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From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a modest decline to 707 people per 100,000 in 2012. In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million. The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers.
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Our carceral state banishes American citizens to a gray wasteland far beyond the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens. Banishment continues long after one’s actual time behind bars has ended, making housing and employment hard to secure. And banishment was not simply a well-intended response to rising crime. It was the method by which we chose to address the problems that preoccupied Moynihan, problems resulting from “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment.” At a cost of $80 billion a year, American correctional facilities are a social-service program—providing health care, meals, and shelter for a whole class of people.
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As the civil-rights movement wound down, Moynihan looked out and saw a black population reeling under the effects of 350 years of bondage and plunder. He believed that these effects could be addressed through state action. They were—through the mass incarceration of millions of black people.
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Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard and one of the leading academic experts on American incarceration, looked at the growth in state prisons in recent years and concluded that a 66 percent increase in the state prison population between 1993 and 2001 had reduced the rate of serious crime by a modest 2 to 5 percent—at a cost to taxpayers of $53 billion.
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The persistent and systematic notion that blacks were especially prone to crime extended even to the state’s view of black leadership. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI for nearly half a century, harassed three generations of leaders. In 1919, he attacked the black nationalist Marcus Garvey as “the foremost radical among his race,” then ruthlessly pursued Garvey into jail and deportation. In 1964, he attacked Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the country,” and hounded him, bugging his hotel rooms, his office, and his home, until his death. Hoover declared the Black Panther Party to be “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and authorized a repressive, lethal campaign against its leaders that culminated in the assassination of Fred Hampton in December of 1969.
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“Law-abiding Negroes point out that there are criminal and treacherous Negroes who secure immunity from punishment because they are fawning and submissive toward whites,” observed the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal in his famous 1944 book about race in America, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. “Such persons are a danger to the Negro community. Leniency toward Negro defendants in cases involving crimes against other Negroes is thus actually a form of discrimination.”
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But even in trying to explain his policies, Clinton neglected to retract the assumption underlying them—that incarcerating large swaths of one population was a purely well-intended, logical, and nonracist response to crime. Even at the time of its passage, Democrats—much like the Republican Nixon a quarter century earlier—knew that the 1994 crime bill was actually about something more than that.
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Odell was born in the midst of an era of government-backed housing discrimination. Indeed, Baltimore was a pioneer in this practice—in 1910, the city council had zoned the city by race. “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums,” J. Barry Mahool, Baltimore’s mayor, said. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such explicit racial-zoning schemes unconstitutional, in 1917, the city turned to other means—restrictive covenants, civic associations, and redlining—to keep blacks isolated.
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For black people, escaping poverty does not mean escaping a poor neighborhood.
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“It’s not just being poor; it’s discrimination in the housing market, it’s subprime loans, it’s drug addiction—and then all of that following you over time,” Sampson told me recently. “We try to split things out and say, ‘Well, you can be poor but still have these other characteristics and qualities.’ It’s the myth of the American Dream that with initiative and industriousness, an individual can always escape impoverished circumstances. But what the data show is that you have these multiple assaults on life chances that make transcending those circumstances difficult and at times nearly impossible.”
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In black cities around the country, Jim Crow—with its housing segregation and job discrimination—imposed boundaries. And within those boundaries an order took root. This world was the product of oppression—but it was a world beloved by the people who lived there. It is a matter of some irony that the time period and the communities Taylor was describing with fond nostalgia are the same ones that so alarmed Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965. Taylor was not blind to the problems—many of them outlined in Moynihan’s report—but he described them as embedded within a larger social fabric, giving them a kind of humanity that Moynihan’s alarmism stripped away.
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Black residents of Detroit had to cope not just with the same structural problems as white residents but also with pervasive racism. Within a precarious economy, black people generally worked the lowest-paying jobs. They came home from those jobs to the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where most of them used their substandard wages to pay inflated prices for inferior housing. Attempts to escape into white neighborhoods were frustrated by restrictive covenants, racist real-estate agents, block associations, and residents whose tactics included, as Sugrue writes, “harassment, mass demonstrations, picketing, effigy burning, window breaking, arson, vandalism, and physical attacks.” Some blacks were richer than others. Some were better educated than others. But all were constricted, not by a tangle of pathologies, but by a tangle of structural perils.
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“The prison boom helps us understand how racial inequality in America was sustained, despite great optimism for the social progress of African Americans,” Bruce Western, the Harvard sociologist, writes. “The prison boom is not the main cause of inequality between blacks and whites in America, but it did foreclose upward mobility and deflate hopes for racial equality.”
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“blaming the victim,”
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and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants.
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“Lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”
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From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again.
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an authoritative report issued last year by the National Research Council concluded, “the current U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and comparative standards.”
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Examining a sample of states, Neal found that from 1985 to 2000, the likelihood of a long prison sentence nearly doubled for drug possession, tripled for drug trafficking, and quintupled for nonaggravated assault.
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“Ask many politicians, newspaper editors, or criminal justice ‘experts’ about our prisons, and you will hear that our problem is that we put too many people in prison,” a 1992 Justice Department report read. “The truth, however, is to the contrary; we are incarcerating too few criminals, and the public is suffering as a result.”
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From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. Then it went still higher.
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These consequences for black men have radiated out to their families. By 2000, more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison—and roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids when they were locked up.
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“More than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary breadwinner in their family,” the National Research Council report noted. Should the family attempt to stay together through incarceration, the loss of income only increases, as the mother must pay for phone time, travel costs for visits, and legal fees. The burden continues after the father returns home, because a criminal record tends to injure employment prospects. For more the National Research Council’s The Growth of Incarceration in the United States is really an atlas of the Gray Wastes. Written by a committee of some of the most distinguished scholars on the subject, the report addresses any question you could possibly have about mass incarceration. You can read it straight through. But it works just as well as an encyclopedia. Through it all, the children suffer.
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Joe Ross
Clara Newton at her home outside Baltimore, holding a picture of her son Odell, who has been in prison for 41 years for a crime he committed when he was 16.…
Added from Joe's Instapaper queue -
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broad curiosity
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socioeconomically unfortunate
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abdcharies
50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration via Digg http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
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a deficit of employed black men of strong character.
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the African American community’s relative poverty.
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“I felt I had to write a paper about the Negro family,” Moynihan later recalled, “to explain to the fellows how there was a problem more difficult than they knew.”
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argued that the federal government was underestimating the damage done to black families by “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment” as well as a “racist virus in the American blood stream,”
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Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have … But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.
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moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.” Out-of-wedlock births were on the rise, and with them, welfare dependency, while the unemployment rate among black men remained high.
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In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.
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“The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut,” he wrote—and deformed the black family and, consequently, the black community.
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their children may have to run the gauntlet all over again. That is not the least vicious aspect of the world that white America has made for the Negro.
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advocated no specific policies to address the crisis it described.
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“A series of recommendations was at first included, then left out,”
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n the way of the attention-arousing argument that a crisis was coming and that family stability was the best measure of success or failure in dealing with it.”
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white America must accept responsibility,
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“flows from centuries of oppression and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family.”
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rather as a condemnation of “the failure of Negro family life,”
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exposed “the breakdown of the Negro family,”
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“broken homes, illegitimacy, and female-oriented homes.”
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“tangle of pathology”
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muster support for an all-out government assault on the structural social problems that held black families down. (“Family as an issue raised the possibility of enlisting the support of conservative groups for quite radical social programs,” he would later write.)
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In its bombastic language, its omission of policy recommendations, its implication that black women were obstacles to black men’s assuming their proper station, and its unnecessarily covert handling, the Moynihan Report militated against its author’s aims.
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the psychologist who first articulated the concept of “blaming the victim,” accused Moynihan’s report of doing just that.
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“Idea Broker in the Race Crisis,”
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“distressed not to have any influence on anybody”
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He began pushing for a minimum income for all American families.
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over the need to help families, not individuals.
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The Family Assistance Plan died in the Senate.
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He pointed out that his pessimistic predictions were now becoming reality. Crime was increasing. So were the number of children in poor, female-headed families. Moynihan issued a dire warning: “Lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”
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mental illness, illiteracy, drug addiction, poverty—increases one’s chances of ending up in the ranks of the incarcerated. “Roughly half of today’s prison inmates are functionally illiterate,”
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These inhabitants, black people, are the preeminent outlaws of the American imagination.
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From America’s very founding, the pursuit of the right to labor, and the right to live free of whipping and of the sale of one’s children, were verboten for blacks.
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“commanded by God” and “approved by Christ.”
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eprived of slavery’s blessings, blacks quickly devolved into criminal deviants who plied their trade with “a savage ferocity peculiar to the vicious negro.” Blacks, the report stated, were preternaturally inclined to rape: “When the lust comes over them they are worse than the wild beast of the forest.”
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lies in the correction of the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slavery.”
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