Measuring the quality of life in black America
Painting an accurate picture is not difficult. Useful measures of family income and cohesiveness, of home ownership, life expectancy, education levels, of unemployment and underemployment abound. But among all the relevant data on the state of black America today one factor stands out: the growth of America’s public policy of racially selective policing, prosecution, and mass imprisonment of its black citizens over the past 30 years. The operation of the crime control industry has left a distinctive, multidimensional and devastating mark on the lives of millions of black families and on the economic and social fabric of the communities in which they live.
About half the nation’s 2.2 million prisoners are black. With only 36 million of us, that’s an astounding 3% of African Americans, counting all ages and both sexes, languishing behind bars, with a roughly equal number on probation, parole, house arrest or other court supervision. Almost one in three 18-year-old black males across the board is likely to catch a felony conviction, and in some communities nearly half the black male workforce under 40 have criminal records. A felony conviction in America is a stunningly accurate predictor of a life of insecure employment at poverty-level wages and no health care, of fragile family ties, of low educational attainment and limited or no civic participation, and a strong likelihood of re-imprisonment. Each month, tens of thousands of jobless, skill-less, stigmatized and often anti-socialized ex-prisoners are released back into communities that lack job and educational opportunities, where intact families are more the exception than the rule, and where upward social mobility is a myth.
Clearly, more than any other single public policy, the day to day operation of America’s crime control industry magnifies and exacerbates racial inequality, deepens black poverty, and wreaks widespread destabilization on black families and communities. Among the many scholars and researchers who have persuasively argued and extensively documented these conditions is Dr. Paul Street of the Chicago Urban League in “The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois and the Nation.”
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Texas, the nation’s second largest state, is the third worst place to be black in America, and is in a class by itself, first because its extraordinary rate of black incarceration affects such a large population. Only New York has more African Americans than Texas, and only the two relatively small states previously mentioned lock up a higher percentage of their black citizens. Though California has 50 percent more people, Texas has a slightly larger prison population and only a 5 to 1 ratio between its black and white rates of imprisonment. We may safely assume that since very few of its wealthy Texans are behind bars, Texas is just a very bad place to be poor, whether you’re black or not.
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