Glenn Loury, a professor in the Department of Economics at Brown University, has long been one of the nation's most outspoken Black intellectuals. For many years he was a leading conservative voice on topics like affirmative action, and whenever he focuses on a policy issue affecting the Black community, people pay attention. In his title essay in the recent book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values, Professor Loury sounds the alarm on some of the same concerns the Children's Defense Fund has been raising when we talk about the pipeline to prison crisis.
Professor Loury begins the book by pointing out just how out of proportion prison rates have become in our country, citing data like a 2005 report from the International Centre for Prison Studies in London that showed the United States had five percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of the world's inmates. As he says, "Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive.... We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country."
This dramatic increase in incarceration rates wasn't in proportion to an equally dramatic increase in crime, as Professor Loury goes on to explain, but was instead tied to a shift in our nation's thinking about the purpose of incarceration--away from rehabilitation and towards punishment. He argues that "[d]espite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why? The question has no simple answer, but the racial composition of prisons is a good place to start."
Professor Loury describes how incarceration trends in the United States are connected to our country's legacy of slavery and segregation. He reminds his readers that cultural phenomena like lynching, Jim Crow, and legal segregation were all part of a deep-seated pattern of racial subordination in America that lasted long after slavery ended. Scholars are now noting that in the post civil-rights era, racially skewed incarceration rates have become a new way of continuing the same old pattern. Professor Loury argues that the United States is unique in the way historically marginalized groups are disproportionally "bearing the brunt of order enforcement." As he puts it, "Crime and punishment in America have a color."
The current incarceration crisis is creating a cycle too many children and youths are finding difficult to escape and that is ravaging Black families and communities. As an example, Professor Loury talks about a large group of Black men who have been devastated by the rise in incarceration rates--the nearly 60 percent of Black male high school dropouts born in the late 1960s who were imprisoned before they turned 40. This is the generation that should be the husbands and fathers at the centers of our communities right now. But even after some of these men have gained release, they and their families continue to be affected by lasting consequences. Professor Loury says, "While locked up, these felons are stigmatized--they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste... [and] we are creating a situation in which the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables."
Professor Loury then takes a philosophical look at the idea of justice to talk about whether any of this is consistent with our society's ideals of fairness. Ultimately, he reminds readers that we still live in a country where there is an undeniable racial gap in all kinds of life outcomes. Poor children of color simply aren't born with the same chances! He explains: "Our society--the society we have made--creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice. This situation raises a moral problem that we cannot avoid. We cannot pretend that there are more important problems in our society, or that this circumstance is the necessary solution to other, more pressing problems--unless we are also prepared to say that we have turned our backs on the ideal of equality for all citizens and abandoned the principles of justice."
There is no more urgent priority for our nation than ensuring every child a level playing field from birth to successful adulthood. Our national soul and future depend on it.
Marian Wright Edelman, whose latest book is The Sea Is So Wide And My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation, is president of the Children's Defense Fund. For more information about the Children's Defense Fund, go to www.childrensdefense.org.
One would be the immediate decriminalization of drugs. Not only would that bankrupt the drug lords, it would deprive the prison industry of the large number of black people who are arrested and disproportionately prosecuted for drug possession and drug dealing.
There also needs to be a confrontation with black criminals who victimize their own communities. Slavery is no excuse for this. We still need to remove violent people from society. Of course, rehabilitation is a better course than punishment, which only reenforces their anger.
The current "hate crime" laws punish those who attack people based on their race, maybe this can be interpreted as applying to people who victimize their own race since they are more vulnerable and closer at hand.
Of course, returning our economy to health is the primary method to reduce crime -- among all groups.
Organized crime thrived for decades and everybody knew what they were doing. Every one knew who was on the payroll and who was protected and who was not. The point no one wants to acknowledge is how crime is encouraged in official circles and how prisons have always been for profit. Why would correction officers need a PAC? Just as crime is a profession, keeping criminals is a profession. As long as there is a profit to be made, all of the criminals will get in line to get theirs.
But I agree with much of what you say. Certainly the drug corruption -- which is why drugs should be legalized -- and I'll take the word of the people who live in those communities about the guns.
Re: crime encouraged in official circles. Yes, police even use the term "career criminals."
Not enough space in one posting, but briefly I think we need to totally revise our criminal justice system ( an unconscious irony, if ever there was one) to emphasize prevention rather than punishment and warehousing. Special, focused attention to first offenders and immersing them in whatever it takes to get them turned around, extending to financial support, free education,voluntary relocation out of threatening environments, for example.
Fundamentally, however, our society needs to be fundamentally re-shaped, a national plan that reorders national priorities and invests in people as our most valuable resource. Generalizations, I agree, but you get the idea.
An aspect of the historical legacy is what was, essentially, legalized slavery during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. African Americans (and some poor whites) were routinely jailed for failing to pay debts, petty crimes such as "vagrancy", and the ever-popular trumped up charges for assaulting white women. These (mostly) men were given no access to unbiased legal representation, and no trial to a jury of their peers. Poor and uneducated, they had no idea what rights they had. They were railroaded into prison terms in hellish places, primarily in very rural areas, where they were forced to on cotton farms, at logging camps, in mines, and anyplace else that the work was deemed dirty and dangerous but essential to producing materials needed for industrial manufacturing. Countless thousands died in these labor camps. Countless hundreds of well-connected private businesses benefited from the work they performed without pay, or even access to decent housing, clothing, food, and medicine. This happened throughout the U.S., and especially in the South. Just one more example of how the poor and the powerless have been mercilessly exploited over the years. Growing intolerance for such injustices began during the 1950s and helped to ameliorate the worst of the offenses. And we all have this reform movement to thank for the Miranda warning.
Everybody is focusing on universities and prison sentences, etc.......But hey, in the meantime there is a near genocide of children in the cities going on right under everybodies eyes. And NOBODY wants to do anything about it. Whats wrong---its not a money-maker for all these so-called civil rights/civic leaders.
And that's a heartfelt shame.
http://blip.tv/file/1356143/
I suggest instead that people do something unpleasant. Check it out for yourself. Visit your local courthouse and local jail. Talk with some inmates. See what is really happening for yourself. You will see that it is much more complex than your ideological lense.
But, I know people are unwilling to really examine what is going on because it is unpleasant, so the system will likely get perpetuated. That's the price of everyone clinging to their preconceived ideas and ideologies.
This is becoming a cultural norm. Inner city minorities dont want to work and dont want to finish highschool and dont have parents and the ones that do are crack addicts or drunks with low paying jobs and they are ignorant and lazy. The kids grow up without leadership, discipline or respect and heeped in ignorance watching MTV. They like the gang mentality and see it as a place to belong without working, just sell drugs and hang out all day.
Before you know it, they're in their 20s and they are hardcore criminals and no longer qualified for decent employment and dont have any marketable skills anyway. They father a few children and never see the woman again. The cycle continues again.
We're paying for it as a society, one way or the other we're paying for it.
"We're paying for it as a society, one way or the other we're paying for it."
Yes, we are. You want to know why? Instead of trying to rehabilitate people, provide more opportunity for minorities and "the disadvantage", people would rather build more prisons even though it costs more. While these prisons provide cheap labor to companies they sap taxpayer dollars from the school systems. Therefore, People move into neighborhoods with supposedly less crime, better schools, but higher property taxes. However, they’re the first ones to complain when they getscrewed by the very leaders they elect to keep the "criminals" out of their neighborhoods. See this is what happens when you look down on the disenfranchisement of others. You become so blinded by your racism that you can't see how your actions allow yourself to be disenfranchised by the ones above you. As of now there are those in the Wall Street who doesn't seem to have a conscious and are wreaking the most havoc on our economy and society as a whole --but you chose to focus on "inner-city minorities". So tell me, as someone taking “FBI” courses, what’s your plan for taking down fraudulent traders -- or is it just easy to come down on the downtrodden versus going against the corporate-political complex?
Surely President Obama was exposed to this menace when he was a Community Organizer, so he knows it is heinous and needs immediate attention. When States need to cut their budgets, this is the first place they could save money...if we could just get the lobbyists out of the mix, maybe we could start a return to common sense and justice.
End the Drug War today. If we hadn't been saddled with the Religious Right's prohibition against drugs, we'd have enough money saved today to climb out of our current Republican engineered economic problems AND institute Universal Health care for all Americans.
The drug war was greatly expanded under Clinton, drug arrests soared under his administration, and the DEA was given even more power.
I fail to see this proven.
What came first ? The crime or the justice ?
First of all, the huge increase in minority Judges, Law Enforcement, Education, and local government has influenced inner city society exponentially. If there is a ethnic bias at work in these statistics then the source is either of minority origin on the professional side or the community in which the candidate grew up. That observation alone would negate Prof. Loury's postulate since the same system doesn't even exist. Even the laws have changed.
Some people in today's society appear to be very influenced by the media and dramatic glorification of gang life and rapgangsters more than they are influenced by their teachers, clergy, community leaders or parents. The road to incarceration is now an accepted path to higher rank within gang life. It's a career move as much as a failure to comply with society rules.
It's a cycle. It needs to be addressed. And it needs to be stopped. But blaming the system or it's history is not going to be a successful method of implementing a turn around. Here's an idea. Lets start with not blaming. And find out what is needed to restore these influences and reduce the gang influence.
Take away the non-violent drug user aspect of the issue and you've put a big dent in the problem--but if we listen to folks like you we'll just continue to misdirect the conversation towards irrational mantras like "Lets start with not blaming."
There's plenty of blame to be placed, but unfortunately folks like you would rather talk BS than address the issue.
I have not seen anything but accusation about the penal system's "privatization" driving the incarceration rate. Until I see more evidence, I'm not going to draw a generalized conclusion.
I agree the prison system should NOT include nonviolent drug offenders. There should be another facility where treatment and rehab is possible if the candidates elects to go through it. But I'm not in favor of an endless number of "chances" while they keep getting busted for 10 years. There has to be a limited number of "rehab" offers.
The worse aspect of this that most seem to miss is that profit motive. If there is a profit to be made placing people in prison, then there is an imperative to place people in prison. We just learned about the scandal in PA. How much more of that goes on yet uncovered? When America finally gets over its addiction to slavery, then America will make progress. Till then, the unprincipled and the savage will continue to hold sway.
Men are not men. Women are overpowering and our children are just lost. This is what they want us to be. So, stop going along with the crap, please. We need Black writers of History. We need newspapers that just don't socialize but, really have something intellectual to say. We need strong voices. We need our Black Universities to do statistics, economics etc. Time out for clubs, frats and sorors--- good but, we need education to return to hard core basics and reality.