Black men and imprisonment

[Knorf]

According to this article,

Being jailed in federal or state prisons has become so common today that more young black men in the United States have done time than have served in the military or earned a college degree, according to new study.

Specifically:

…for men born in 1965–69 who survived until 1999…22.4 percent of surviving black men born in that period had spent time in jail, while just 17.4 percent had served in the military and only 12.5 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree.

This study has gotten almost no airtime in the regular media outlets, as far as I can tell. But doesn’t it seem kind of important? There are lots of studies suggesting that various laws unfairly target minorities, or that minorities (in particular, black men) are convicted at higher rates and given harsher prison sentences.

What does it mean for society when imprisonment is a major, common life event for an entire demographic group? Do such statistics make a stronger case for affirmative action? Or do we prefer, as a society, to spend more money incarcerating these men instead of giving them a university education? Which kind of spending would be better for society as a whole?

[drachillix]

Compared to…

[drachillix]

from the linked article

The incarceration rate for black men born in 1945–49 was 10.6 percent by the time they were in their early 30s, but increased to 20.5 percent for those born in 1965–69. Among white men the overall risk of imprisonment grew from 1.4 percent to 2.9 percent over the same time period.

So ithe incarceration rate increased 193% for black males and 207% for white males. Are they trying to say that white males are getting a bad rap or black males?

[msmith537]

Wait…so you are saying that there are a lot of black men in prison…I am…shocked!! Shocked I tell you!!.

In all seriousness, this probably hasn’t made the news recently because it isn’t really news. People have known for awhile now that prisons populations tend to consist of a disproportionate number of blacks.

It is really a symptom of economic conditions in many black communities, not a problem in and of itself. That is not to say that it is not a cause for concern.

“What does it mean for society when imprisonment is a major, common life event for an entire demographic group? Do such statistics make a stronger case for affirmative action? Or do we prefer, as a society, to spend more money incarcerating these men instead of giving them a university education? Which kind of spending would be better for society as a whole?”

What it means that if you are born black, there is a strong expectation that you will be going to jail at some point and people tend to live up to their expectations. Is it a stronger case for afirmative action? No. Why should we “give” them an education. We can provide opportunities for them to earn an education like the rest of us, but if the willingness or the expectations to succeed are not there, we could send every black man to Harvard and it wouldn’t do any good.

There was an interesting episode of CNN Presents that talked about minorities and education and why so many of them fail to succeed, even when they have the intelligence. A lot of it had to with perceptions of being singled out or “selling out” or failing to use the system to their advantage. For example, say John Whiteman is taking AP credit courses while Tyrone Washington is in CP classes (College Prep…not Colored People for those of you who say the show). John is getting Cs while Tyrone is getting As and Bs. John has a better chance of getting into a better school because of the AP courses.

The problem goes a little deeper than just giving scholarships to everyone in the hood.

[Duckster]

Perhaps the Bill Cobsy speech thread has some relevance here.

[01010000]

@drachillix

from the linked article
So ithe incarceration rate increased 193% for black males and 207% for white males. Are they trying to say that white males are getting a bad rap or black males?

The precentages indicate that overall incarceration rates are up for both groups, but since blacks represent say 13% of the population there should be a cause for concern due to a higher percentage of the population being incarcerated as well as living in poverty.

Affirmative action will probably not work as well as changing the formula as to how schools are funded. Poor neighborhoods under the current forumula will always have poor schools that lack resources. What will also help is deconstruction the notion that when black people move into a neighborhood it means that the value of the neighborhood is somehow diminished.

As the country becomes increasingly facist, more people will go to jail and more white people will go to jail as well if the economy continues in the direction that it is going. I lived in a neighborhood that had a couple of blocks of factories where people used to work, those factories are now apartments. Others have studied this phenomenom and have concluded that this is part of the reason rise in poverty especially in the black community. Fifty years ago you used to be able to get a decent paying factory job with no skills or little education, these days you wind up homeless or in prison.

[emacknight]

@01010000

Fifty years ago you used to be able to get a decent paying factory job with no skills or little education, these days you wind up homeless or in prison.

Is that really something you want in society? Should children seek to avoid skills and education because they will get a high paying job? I was brought up with the exact opposite mentallity. And perhaps the real problem here is that there were too many high paying jobs available to those without skills. So either there are fewer of those jobs, or there are more uneducated and unskilled people. I guess at the latter.

Unfortunately I think Bill Cosby has it right. But its not just a “black” problem. I think when you look closely you’re realize that white and hispanic children growing up in the same environment end up in the same jails.

[01010000]

Those unskilled jobs are the jobs that enabled immigrants to fund the education and betterment of their offspring.

Some more food for thought from this link: http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040329/007323.html

Messner and Rosenfeld (1994), in Crime and the
American Dream, seek to explain American patterns of
crime through the cultural and structural organization
of American society. They acknowledge their
intellectual indebtedness to Robert K. Merton whose
strain model had supported the war on poverty.
Further, in Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the
Decline of Social Institutions in America, LaFree
(1998) links rising crime rates to changing
institutional conditions of American society. Sampson
and Raudenbush (1999), in the most expansive study of
Chicago neighborhoods, find that public disorder,
including crime, is caused by structural constraints
and deprivation and by collective efficacy, that is
‘cohesion among residents combined with shared
expectations for the social control of public space’
(1999, 603). Uggen (2000) finds that work programs for
criminal offenders contribute significantly to their
chances of abandoning criminal careers. Hagan and
McCarthy (1997), in Mean Streets: Youth Crime and
Homelessness, challenge school criminologists who,
through self-report studies, found criminal behavior
to be equally distributed across social classes. Their
book shows how extreme deprivation of the street
produces serious crime in which middle-class
youngsters rarely get involved. They also show,
through an inter-city comparison of Toronto and
Vancouver, how social support programs are suited to
reduce the risk of life in the street and of
involvement in serious crime. (For a discussion see
Theoretical *703 Criminology, vol. 4, no. 2.) Other
studies that reaffirm the relationship between social
inequality and crime (by authors such as R. J. Sampson
and W. J. Wilson, K. Land, D. Steffensmeier, K.
Heimer, and J. Braithwaite) appear in Hagan and
Peterson (1995).

[Renob]

@01010000

Poor neighborhoods under the current forumula will always have poor schools that lack resources.

It isn’t money that’s the problem in these areas. Take Washington, D.C., for example. It has some of the worst schools in the nation. In some schools, 99% of the students score below proficient on math and science tests. D.C. also has the highest per-pupil spending average in the nation. I believe that it was around $11,000 a few years ago. If money were the issue, D.C. schools would be some of the best in the nation. Obviously there is more to it than just how much money schools have.

[XT]

Its a lot more than just a money issue for the schools. Here in New Mexico a lot of our schools, especially the Charter Schools get loads of federal funding (from programs like eRate and such), the kids basically eat free breakfast and lunch in many cases (provided by the fed and the state), have access to computer technology, internet access in the classroom, wireless laptops for the labs, advanced teaching tools for the teachers, TV/VCR’s and close circuit distribution…and we are one of the lowest as far as scores go in the nation. At several of the Charter Schools I volunteer my time to the kids destroy the computers and everything else (they have to lock the bathrooms now because the kids destroyed them)…or steal anything they can, sometimes with no good reason except because its there. They are disrespectful in the classroom, and border on the verge of being out of control at times. And they have a huge problem with kids dropping out and/or getting pregnant.

Now, these are hispanic schools, not black, but I figure its much the same thing…its the same kind of environment, same kind of poverty, same types of family situation…and the same barrio mentality IMO. And I would guess (I don’t have a cite for this off hand) that hispanics are the up and commers as far as imprisonment of OUR young males go.

From my perspective tossing money at this problem won’t solve anything. I’ve seen literally millions spent on poor schools in New Mexico and the situation just seems to get worse and worse. I don’t know if its the same with blacks, but the kids at these Charter Schools almost seem to wear their bad grades as a mark of honor. Getting good grades is definitely looked down on…it could bring about an ass kicking in fact. And the barrio is what they know. Its where their family is, where their friends are…its the ways they know. Breaking out of that is VERY hard. I should know…my family managed to do it.

Whats the solution? I wish I knew. Somehow you would need to instill in these kids the desire TO break out, to leave behind everything they know and understand (and in the case of a lot of the barrios I’m talking about, to leave behind the language they are most comfortable with as well). You’d need to make it so getting good grades and excelling weren’t looked down upon, ostricised, etc, but something to be proud of. You’d need to find the way to break the hold of the barrio mindset on the people who live there…especially their families. And I don’t know any way to do that except on an individual basis. If someone else has a thought on this, I’d sure love to hear it.

-XT

[01010000]

Average per public spending doesn’t translate into all schools being funded equally. Moreover having computers and other resources are good but you also have to have quality teachers as well. It is true that there is a sub-culture that exists that doesn’t value education highly, but that too is something that needs to be addressed because it’s a nationwide problem. Being smart is really cool in this culture, though being slick is.

[even_sven]

@emacknight

Is that really something you want in society? Should children seek to avoid skills and education because they will get a high paying job?

The idea isn’t that the problem is not just education- it is poverty and the hopelessness and nihlism that extreme poverty can bring. Education is not and has never been equal. There are and always have been neighborhoods and populations where getting a good education is an uphill battle. I went to school with some smart kids, and my school had plenty of brilliant kids with 4.0s and great SATS (which is amazing considering that our teachers didn’t really mention what the SAT was or why it was a good idea to take one) and yet in ten years we had one person go to Stanford (the best school anyone was shooting for). My best friend went to a school where only the screw-ups went to a non-Ivy legue like Stanford.

Anyway, not getting a great education didn’t used to be such a handicap. There were chances to make your life even if you didn’t or couldn’t get one. As long as you worked hard, you wouldn’t have to face hungry kids or homelessness. Banding together in street gangs and turning to crime wern’t so alluring.

Nowdays that isn’t true. Blue coller jobs have disappeared. The chance to own a small business has been almost destroyed by huge companies. The businesses that fill our cities use a disposable and untrained labor force on absurdly low wages. No matter how good a person you are or how hard you work, you’re not going to make it that far up the ladder at WalMart. Your lucky if you even get to the point that you can feed yourself. Of course poverty, hopelessness and nihlism are going to occur. Of course those will bring crime and imprisonment. So many people start out with so many strikes already against them and there is nowhere for them to go.

[John_Mace]

@even sven

As long as you worked hard, you wouldn’t have to face hungry kids…

I think most of us **wish ** this problem was caused by concerned parents stealing to feed their children. That’s something that can be solved.

[Zagadka]

For one, I’m sick and bloody tired of the rhetoric, “Let’s give every kid his own computer!” Look, learning how to use computers is an important job skill. Throwing away billions of dollars giving them laptops is just stupid. Having access to a computer may make you more productive, but it doens’t make you SMARTER.

They end up blowing most of their budget and HUGE amounts of time maintaining networks, repairing broken computers, etc, and the net effect is usually not a much better education. Back in my day, you took AP/IB courses, and the difference was not fancier technology - it was BETTER TEACHERS, BETTER TEXTBOOKS, and a BETTER CURRICULUM. For the gods’ sake, my AP US History teacher still used filmstrips in '96. Laserdiscs were the fanciest we had in IB Chemistry. And you know what? We still learned the god damned material.

Those AP/IB classrooms had, at best, one ancient Mac from the early '90s sitting around so the teacher could record grades. On the flip side, the program for students who were getting failing grades had a brand new Mac for every student. Know what? They were still dumb. Dumb kid + computer != smart kid, at least until they invent some kind of cybernetic brain implant.

The AP/IB programs had less distractions and more pure teaching. More material. More stuff to cover. Stricter testing. We left behind multiple choice ScanTron and moved on to timed written essays. And y’know what? We were all the smarter for it.

I’m sick and god damned tired of the babbling rhetoric about technology and education these days. Fine, teach kids how to use computers, but don’t expect computers to be some kind of f*ing magic pill that makes them suddenly perfect students. 90% of the time, you’re just giving them distractions and something else to steal/break.

Addressing xtisme’s points, that kind of behavior is not limited to any special ethnic group. It is related to social class. Here in Los Angeles, the difference between a white, black, hispanic, and asian underachiever is which gang they are in. Their behavior is the same - they will all vandalize and steal property as it is presented to them.

I was my high school’s unofficial tech person, because none of the faculty knew diddly about computers. I got to fix all the times they vandalized the equipment, I got to “moron-proof” the systems so they couldn’t go in and destroy Windows. Pretty much every day I had to completely redo a half dozen systems because the students screwed them up and the teachers had no clue how to repair them. It was a constant battle to find out in which hidden directory they had installed Descent or Doom or Command and Conquer to play DURING CLASS. This is where I earned my BOFH hat. As an aside, their security system was so pathetic that I could have changed anyone’s grades from any client computer on the campus.

Man, once those bleeping thugs figured out how to set screensavers with passwords, my stress went through the roof. They would actually yank me out of other classes so I could go fix the tech lab’s computers, because half the class couldn’t do any work. Part of this is all do to our good buddy Windows95’s crappy ass security, but most of it was due to vindictive students who would sabotage anything you put within 5’ of them. When they couldn’t figure out how to destroy the Windows install, they would jam gum or pens into the power supply and drives.

OK, I’m off topic. The gist is that giving students computers is a bad idea, and it certainly won’t fix this problem.

The real issue is with how the schools are run, and how the families are raised. If the kids aren’t getting proper guidance at home, then they aren’t going to pay attention to teachers. You have a huge number of single-parent families. You have ghettos. You have all kinds of problems that are leading to this.

Affirmative Action will do a lot to make liberals feel warm and fuzzy, make the statistics look pretty, but won’t change much of anything.

[Uncommon_Sense]

@xtisme

You’d need to make it so getting good grades and excelling weren’t looked down upon, ostricised, etc, but something to be proud of. You’d need to find the way to break the hold of the barrio mindset on the people who live there…especially their families. And I don’t know any way to do that except on an individual basis. If someone else has a thought on this, I’d sure love to hear it.

-XT

Agree. You have to start with community leaders enforcing the idea that these principles must start at home. From the parents on down and repeating in each generation thereafter. Eventually you`ll have more sound families and the cycle of education-jobs-stable family life-etc. will continue. Right now as it stands we have the so called black leaders in the communities pointing fingers at everyone else instead of at themselves and at those who are directly responsible for their own actions. A grass roots effort, if you will, to create opportunity from within rather than wait to see what the man will do for them. This will directly effect the incarceration rate of the black male.

[Uncommon_Sense]

@Zagadka

Affirmative Action will do a lot to make liberals feel warm and fuzzy, make the statistics look pretty, but won’t change much of anything.

True, AA is a result of the finger pointing I mentioned above. I believe it causes more harm than good (AA that is).

[athelas]

>As the country becomes increasingly facist, more people will go to jail

Dare I ask for a cite?

[athelas]

For the fascism, that is.

[monstro]

[QUOTE=Uncommon Sense]
Agree. You have to start with community leaders enforcing the idea that these principles must start at home. From the parents on down and repeating in each generation thereafter. Eventually you`ll have more sound families and the cycle of education-jobs-stable family life-etc. will continue. Right now as it stands we have the so called black leaders in the communities pointing fingers at everyone else instead of at themselves and at those who are directly responsible for their own actions.

[QUOTE]

Name three “black leaders”, who are not Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, that are pointing fingers at everyone else.

And while you’re at it, why don’t you tell us good people how a black leader gets appointed or elected. How does one become a black leader? And what is a so-called black leader?

Can you tell that I’m sick of people talking about “black leaders”?

[monstro]

@Uncommon Sense

Agree. You have to start with community leaders enforcing the idea that these principles must start at home. From the parents on down and repeating in each generation thereafter. Eventually you`ll have more sound families and the cycle of education-jobs-stable family life-etc. will continue. Right now as it stands we have the so called black leaders in the communities pointing fingers at everyone else instead of at themselves and at those who are directly responsible for their own actions.

Name three “black leaders”, who are not Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, that are pointing fingers at everyone else.

And while you’re at it, why don’t you tell us good people how a black leader gets appointed or elected. How does one become a black leader? And what is a so-called black leader?

Can you tell that I’m sick of people talking about “black leaders”?