Black men are no better off than they were more than 40 years ago,
due to mass incarceration and job losses suffered during the Great
Recession, according to a new report by researchers at the University of
Chicago.
“The growth of incarceration rates among Black men in recent decades
combined with the sharp drop in Black employment rates during the Great
Recession have left most Black men in a position relative to white men
that is really no better than the position they occupied only a few
years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965,” the co-authors wrote.
“Today, Black-white gaps in math and reading scores among youth and
Black-white gaps in overall educational attainment among young adults
are quite similar to the corresponding gaps observed around 1990,”
stated the report which also suggested that “relative to whites, labor
market outcomes among Black men are no better now and possibly worse
than they were in 1970.”
Neal, an economics professor, said that he was surprised that the
rise in our nation’s prison population, which correlated with the fall
in employment rates for Black men, really was a policy choice and that
the war on drugs was just a small part of a much bigger story.
Beginning in the 1980s, in an effort to get tough on crime, states
eliminated discretionary parole, established independent sentencing
commissions, and crafted “Three Strikes and You’re Out” enhanced
sentencing guidelines for repeat offenders.
Truth-in-Sentencing (TIS) Incentive Grants Program gave states money
to build prisons and indirectly encouraged state officials to adopt
policies “requiring sentenced offenders to serve large portions of their
sentences.”
Neal said that it wasn’t one or two types of crimes that we got tougher on, it was across the board.
“We started to lock people up for a really long time relative to what we had done in the past,” said Neal.
The report said that changes in criminal justice policies accounted
for more than 70 percent of the growth in the prison population between
1986 and 2006.
The United States leads the world when it comes to locking people up
“with 2.2 million people currently in the nation’s prisons or jails — a
500 percent increase over the past thirty years” according to The
Sentencing Project.
The report said that “on any given day in 2010, almost one in ten
Black men ages 20-39 were institutionalized” and “because turnover among
prison populations is quite high, these results suggest that far more
than ten percent of prime age Black men will serve some time in prison
or jail during a given calendar year.”
Black men over 20 years-old still face a double-digit unemployment
rate, the highest rate among all adult worker groups. According to the
Labor Department, the jobless rate for Black men was 10.9 percent
compared to 4.9 percent for white men, 4.8 percent for white women and
nine percent for Black women.
The “Smart on Crime” initiative proposed by
Attorney General Eric Holder in 2013, that will ultimately affect the
lives of thousands of nonviolent, drug offenders, was just “a drop in
the bucket,” because those policies will mostly affect people doing time
in federal prisons. Most offenders are locked up in local jails and
state prisons.
Local jails, state and federal prisons combined house close to a million Black men.
Neal said that if you’re a Black man 25 to 35 years old without a
high school diploma, you’re about as likely to have a job as you are to
be in prison; under 25 without a high school diploma, you’re more likely
to be in prison.
“You have to get to the 35 and above age group, before you’re more
likely to have a job than be in prison, said Neal. “I don’t think the
typical person on the street or the typical congressman knows how messed
up things are.”
taken from here
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