US Black Men Still Marginalised

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