aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Why are so many African Americans in prison?

Among the points made by Richard Thompson Ford in today’s WaPo:

Many of our nation’s cities are as racially segregated as they were in the era of Jim Crow, many minority neighborhoods are crime-plagued and bereft of opportunities for gainful employment, and one in three black men between 20 and 29 is in prison, on parole or on probation.

I hasten to remind folks of the work of Thomas J. Sugrue, Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. From the podcast of his lecture, Jim Crow`s Last Stand: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Suburban North, I learned both that he has an important book book coming out in the fall, and that today 23 of the 25 most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States are in the Northeast. (And that the states with the highest degree of educational segregation by race are also disproportionately in the Northeast and the Midwest.)

But I live in the rural South and in my town we have six prisons. Six prisons. America has grown more and more retributive and punishing—more so even than anyplace else in the modern world—as the crime rate has fallen to historical lows.

Glenn C. Loury asked last summer in The Boston Review, Why Are We Locking Up So Many Americans:

[I]mprisonment rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t), not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.

One simple measure of punitiveness is the likelihood that a person who is arrested will be subsequently incarcerated. Between 1980 and 2001, there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28 percent. And because the amount of time served and the rate of prison admission both increased, the incarceration rate for violent crime almost tripled, despite the decline in the level of violence. The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime.

But with those rates of black imprisonment, with the raw numbers of African American males who are jailed and broken and not trained and not schooled and not given a first much less a second chance, one really truly has to wonder if our prison system isn’t a descendant of slavery, if it isn’t its modern relative.

Loury continues:

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post–civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

The political scientist Vesla Mae Weaver, in a recently completed dissertation, examines policy history, public opinion, and media processes in an attempt to understand the role of race in this historic transformation of criminal justice. She argues-persuasively, I think-that the punitive turn represented a political response to the success of the civil-rights movement. Weaver describes a process of “frontlash” in which opponents of the civil-rights revolution sought to regain the upper hand by shifting to a new issue. Rather than reacting directly to civil-rights developments, and thus continuing to fight a battle they had lost, those opponents-consider George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, which drew so much support in states like Michigan and Wisconsin-shifted attention to a seemingly race-neutral concern over crime:

Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda. Through the process of frontlash, rivals of civil rights progress defined racial discord as criminal and argued that crime legislation would be a panacea to racial unrest. This strategy both imbued crime with race and depoliticized racial struggle, a formula which foreclosed earlier “root causes” alternatives. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder-initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement-were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.

Of course, this argument (for which Weaver adduces considerable circumstantial evidence) is speculative. But something interesting seems to have been going on in the late 1960s regarding the relationship between attitudes on race and social policy.

We are, these days, swept up in the hope of a new generation of leadership. I hope, too, that a new day is dawning. But I fear that these are big powerful forces we are up against.

I believe that our two powerful Democratic candidates are going to reconcile their differences. Both will lead and we will win the presidential election this year. I only hope that united we can begin to chip away at these challenges.

From great challenges come great solutions. We sure need a great solution for this one.