Misguided Focus

Misguided Focus

Seeing the world through the prism of white racism as the cause of all things
bad is misguided and itself racist. Shea says, "the growing black prison
population is eroding African-Americans' confidence in the rule of law." What
about the four white men and their families who spent 30 years in Jail (two died
in prison) after an FBI frameup? (Christopher Shea, "Life sentence," Boston
Globe, September 23, 2007)
Peter Limone, and Joe Salvati (Tamelo and Greco died in prison) lived to
see their freedom. They were initially sentenced to death for a murder they did
not commit. Why is this only a black issue? It is a matter for all Americans.
Making the issue a race issue shuts out all non African Americans who were
harmed by the same courts, police, judges and lawyers.
Spineless politicians get elected by the same interest groups who have an
economic interest in keeping the system as it is or making it worse.
Police, corrections officers, lawyers, construction corporations, social
workers, drug companies and psychiatrists (to keep the list manageable) enjoy
the way it is.
Just because "Black Americans interpret [the trends] as evidence of stark
racism," does make it so. Many prominent black people see racism as the cause of
all unpleasant events in their lives. They are obsessed with racism as the
explanation for all evil.
At the same time liberal politicians promoted and implemented policies
which encouraged the causes of increased crime and incarceration. As recently as
1995 Princeton Professor John Iulio noted that there were 4 million young men
who would be teenagers in the beginning of the 21st century. He said they are
fatherless, godless and jobless. 12 years after that observation (See Fox
Butterfield, NYTimes Nov 19 1995) and the country is reaping what it sowed
over the past 40 years.

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

CRITICAL FACULTIES
Life sentence
It's a government program whose impact rivals the New Deal. It pushes whole
communities out of society's mainstream. It costs tens of billions of dollars a
year. Scholars are just beginning to understand how prison is reshaping the
country.
Boston Globe
By Christopher Shea
September 23, 2007

WHAT if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed? And what if, instead
of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multibillion-dollar project
steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American
mainstream?

That's how America should think about its growing prison system, some leading
social scientists are saying, in research that suggests prisons have a far
deeper impact on the nation than simply punishing criminals.

Fueled by the war on drugs, "three-strike" laws, and mandatory minimum
sentences, America's prisons and jails now house some 2.2 million inmates -
roughly seven times the figure of the early 1970s. And Americans are investing
vast resources to keep the system running: The cost to maintain American
correctional institutions is some $60 billion a year.

For years sociologists saw prisons - with their disproportionately poor, black,
and uneducated populations - partly as mirrors of the social and economic
disparities that cleave American life. Now, however, a new crop of books and
articles are looking at the penal system not just as a reflection of society,
but a force that shapes it.

In this view, the system takes men with limited education and job skills and
stigmatizes them in a way that makes it hard for them to find jobs, slashes
their wages when they do find them, and brands them as bad future spouses. The
effects of imprisonment ripple out from prisoners, breaking up families and
further impoverishing neighborhoods, creating the conditions for more crime down
the road. Prisons have grown into potent "engines of inequality," in the words
of sociologist Bruce Western; the penal system, he and other scholars suggest,
actively widens the gap between the poor - especially poor black men - and
everyone else.

"This is a historic transformation of the character of American society," says
Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist who has begun to write on this topic,
most recently in the Boston Review. "We are managing the losers by confinement."

The shift isn't just academic. In national politics, concern about the people
who actually go to prison has been drowned out by tough-on-crime rhetoric, but
today the issue is getting a hearing from some politicians, and not just
hard-left liberals. On Oct. 4, Congress's Joint Economic Committee will hear
testimony from Western, Loury, and others on the economic and social costs of
the prison boom. The session will be chaired by Jim Webb, the gruff, moderate
Democratic Senator from Virginia. Cities including Boston and San Francisco are
changing their hiring practices to destigmatize prisoners, and there is
detectable momentum in Congress toward reducing the extraordinarily harsh
minimum sentences for possession of crack cocaine, which disproportionately
affect poor black Americans.

The issue has arrived on the public agenda in part because of the work done by a
handful of leading sociologists. Western's 2006 book "Punishment and Inequality
in America" is a key work in this new scholarly movement. Devah Pager, a
Princeton sociologist, has been making headlines since her dissertation,
completed in 2002 at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated how a criminal
record - even for nonviolent drug offenses - made it nearly impossible for black
ex-convicts in Milwaukee to land a job. This month, a book based on that work,
"Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration," appears
in bookstores. And the sociologist Lawrence Bobo, who left Harvard for Stanford
two years ago but is returning in January, has been investigating how the
growing black prison population is eroding African-Americans' confidence in the
rule of law.

For years, the penal system was a marginal topic among sociologists, catching
the interest chiefly of professors with an interest in hard-core criminology.
But in the past decade, discussion of incarceration has moved to the center of
the field, in the work of respected scholars at top institutions who are
interested in a broad understanding of American inequality.

"My sense of it is just that the sheer mass, the weight of the reality of what's
happening, has sunk in," says Loury.

With black men in their early 30s more likely to have been in prison than to
have graduated from college, and with 700,000 ex-prisoners reentering society
each year, the trends cannot be ignored. The current US rate of some 750
prisoners per 100,000 citizens is several times higher than rates in Europe -
higher, even, than the rates in formerly repressive states like Russia or South
Africa.

In "Punishment and Inequality in America," Western documented the degree to
which poor black communities across America live in a penitentiary shadow. Of
black males born in the late 1960s who did not attend college, 30 percent have
served time in prison, he pointed out. For high-school dropouts, the figure is a
startling 59 percent. "I don't think the really deep penetration of the criminal
justice system into poor and minority communities has been fully understood by
people outside these communities," says Western.

Mass incarceration, Western argues, also renders invisible a substantial portion
of American poverty. At the height of the tech boom in 2000, he points out, 65
percent of black male high school dropouts weren't working. Government
statistics, however, said the unemployment level of this group was 33 percent,
because government surveys exclude prisoners.

At the root of prison's broader social impact lies its lingering effect on
individual lives. In an ideal penal system, prisoners might exit the system
having paid their debt to society and be more or less restored to their previous
status as free men and women. But Pager's book demonstrates just how detached
from reality that view is. She had four college students, two black and two
white, pose as applicants for low-level jobs in Milwaukee (excluding jobs where
a criminal record would have disqualified them).

They used résumés that were nearly identical - high school degrees, steady
progress from entry-level work to a supervisory position - except that in some
cases the applicant had a drug conviction in his past (possession with intent to
distribute) for which he served an 18-month sentence and then behaved perfectly
on parole.

In surveys conducted by Pager, 62 percent of Milwaukee employers said they'd
consider hiring an applicant with a nonviolent drug offense in his past. But in
her field study, Pager found that her black applicants with criminal records got
called for an interview - or to interview on the spot, as they applied in person
- a mere 5 percent of the time. That compared with 14 percent for the black
applicants without a criminal record. Meanwhile, the white applicants with a
record were called back 17 percent of the time, compared with 34 percent for the
white men lacking the blotch on their résumé. "Two strikes" - blackness and a
record - "and you're out" is how Pager summarizes her findings. (Pager has
replicated this study in New York City, with similar results.)

Job prospects for black ex-prisoners in Milwaukee may be even worse in the
future, Pager argues in "Marked," because while the vast majority of job growth
is in the suburbs, the gap between employers' receptiveness to black and white
ex-convicts is even wider there.

Western explores the same set of post-prison issues on a broader statistical
canvas. He found that whites, Hispanics, and blacks all face a hit in their
wages of about a third, relative to their peers, when they emerge from prison,
and also work fewer weeks per year. Their peers will see significant raises from
ages 25 to 35, but the ex-prisoners won't, widening the gap. Former prisoners,
too, are far less likely ever to marry, but no less likely to have kids, meaning
that prisons contribute to the epidemic of female-headed, single-parent
households. (Some 9 percent of all black children now have a father in jail.)

Sociologists and a few politicians are not the only ones aware of these trends,
argues Lawrence Bobo. Black Americans interpret them as evidence of stark
racism, according to surveys he's done. Seventy-nine percent of white Americans,
for example, think drug laws are enforced fairly, compared with 34 percent of
black Americans.

Black Americans' concerns about the justice system burst to the fore in Jena,
La., last week when thousands protested prosecutors' tough treatment of six
black teenagers after an assault on a white student. When Bobo looks broadly at
black attitudes about the justice system, he doesn't find them irrational.

"We as a society," Bobo wrote last year, "have normalized and, for the time
being, depoliticized a remarkable set of social conditions."

Policy makers are slowly beginning to reckon with some aspects of these
developments. In 2004, President Bush, in his State of the Union address,
acknowledged some of the challenges caused by mass incarceration, Pager points
out, describing the hundreds of thousands exiting prisons annually as a "group
of Americans in need of help." And this year liberals like Senator Joseph Biden
(D-Del.) and conservatives like Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) have cosponsored
the so-called Second Chance Act. It would provide $192 million for drug
counseling, family counseling, housing, and mentorship for ex-offenders to
assist their reentry into their communities.

A handful of cities, including Boston, no longer ask applicants for city jobs
whether they have a criminal record, although their backgrounds can still be
checked later. A growing "Ban the Box" movement - referring to the check-off box
on an application, signaling a conviction - is designed to reduce the kind of
upfront discrimination Pager identifies. San Francisco and St. Paul have also
signed off on the idea, while Los Angeles is pondering it.

To these ideas, Pager would add a policy modeled on how we treat debtors: After
a certain amount of time, records of most convictions, especially for nonviolent
offenses, would be expunged. Stigma would have a deadline.

Such proposals would do nothing to roll back prison populations, but bills
introduced by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Biden
to raise the amount of crack cocaine that triggers automatic five- and ten-year
sentences might do so. (The possession of crack - typically a drug of the poor,
and specifically the black poor - is penalized far more harshly than the
powdered cocaine preferred by middle- and upper-class drug users.) Bruce Western
advocates ending mandatory minimum sentences for drug conviction, and adds some
further thoughts about reducing prison populations: "We could be spending money
and social services to reduce the risks that make people likely to go to prison
in the first place - on drug addiction, on mental-health services, on housing."

In a campaign year, the prison issue is a tough one - such arguments don't have
the easy pull on voters that "tough on crime" policies do. Yet with Congress
calling prison experts to testify about their research, and coverage in the
mainstream media of the protests in Jena, "I do sense there is a public
conversation beginning," Western says.

Christopher Shea's column appears regularly in Ideas. E-mail
criticalfaculties@verizon.net.