National News
Black Men Show little Signs of Progress in 40 years
By Freddie Allen
NNPA Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON (NNPA) –Black men are
no better off than they were more than 40
years ago, due to mass incarceration and job
losses suffered during the Great Recession,
according to a new report by researchers at
the University of Chicago.
Derek Neal and Armin Rick, the co-
authors of the study, found that reforms in
the criminal justice system at the state-level
largely contributed to disparities in arrests
and incarceration rates that ultimately sti-
fled educational and economic progress for
Black men.
“The growth of incarceration rates among
Black men in recent decades combined with
“Today, Black-White gaps in math and
reading scores among youth and Black-
White gaps in overall educational
attainment among young adults are quite
similar to the corresponding gaps observed
around 1990,” stated the report which also
suggested that “relative to Whites, labor
market outcomes among Black men are no
better now and possibly worse than they
were in 1970.”
Neal, an economics professor, said that he
was surprised that the rise in our nation’s
prison population, which correlated with the
fall in employment rates for Black men,
really was a policy choice and that the war
on drugs was just a small part of a much
bigger story.
Beginning in the 1980s, in an effort to get
The report said that changes in criminal justice
policies accounted for more than 70 percent of
the growth in the prison population between
1986 and 2006
the sharp drop in Black employment rates
during the Great Recession have left most
Black men in a position relative to White
men that is really no better than the position
they occupied only a few years after the
Civil Rights Act of 1965,” the co-authors
wrote.
The report cites research conducted by
James Smith and Finis Welch published in
1989 that showed, “the black-white gap in
completed years of schooling among males
ages 26-35 fell from 3.9 years of schooling
in 1940 to 1.4 years in 1980.”
Blacks also experienced “dramatic eco-
nomic and social progress” during that time
period. That progress slowed for Black men
during the 1990s, and in some cases,
reversed course entirely.
tough on crime, states eliminated discre-
tionary parole, established independent
sentencing commissions, and crafted
“Three Strikes and You’re Out” enhanced
sentencing guidelines for repeat offenders.
Truth-in-Sentencing (TIS) Incentive
Grants Program gave states money to build
prisons and indirectly encouraged state offi-
cials to adopt policies “requiring sentenced
offenders to serve large portions of their
sentences.”
Neal said that it wasn’t one or two types
of crimes that we got tougher on, it was
across the board.
“We started to lock people up for a really
long time relative to what we had done in
the past,” said Neal.
The report said that changes in criminal
Page 10 The Portland and Seattle Skanner July 30, 2014
Black men are no better off than they were more than 40 years ago, due to
mass incarceration and job losses suffered during the Great Recession,
according to a new report by researchers at the university of Chicago.
justice policies accounted for more than 70
percent of the growth in the prison popula-
tion between 1986 and 2006.
The United States leads the world when it
comes to locking people up “with 2.2 mil-
lion people currently in the nation’s prisons
or jails – a 500 percent increase over the
past thirty years,” according to The Sen-
tencing Project.
The report said that “on any given day in
2010, almost one in ten black men ages 20-
39 were institutionalized,” and “because
turnover among prison populations is quite
high, these results suggest that far more
than ten percent of prime age black men
will serve some time in prison or jail during
a given calendar year.”
Neal explained that the change in how we
punish people in the state criminal justice
system and adopted harsher penalties for all
types of crimes was across the board that
affected people that were arrested in rough-
ly the same ways regardless of whether you
were Black or White.
“However, as a fraction of the population,
Blacks have always been more likely to be
arrested than Whites, which is not surpris-
ing given the historical patterns of
discrimination, lower earnings and labor
market opportunities,” said Neal.
Black men over 20 years-old still face a
double-digit unemployment rate, the high-
est rate among all adult worker groups.
According to the Labor Department, the
jobless rate for Black men was 10.9 percent
compared to 4.9 percent for White men, 4.8
percent for White women and 9 percent for
Black women.
The same economic crisis that crippled
many Black families and robbed nearly half
of all wealth from the Black community,
also forced cash-strapped states to cut
spending in the billion-dollar prison indus-
try. The prison boom was just an unlikely
casualty of the Great Recession, according
to Neal.
Neal also said that the “Smart on Crime”
initiative proposed by Attorney General
Eric Holder in 2013, that will ultimately
affect the lives of thousands of nonviolent,
drug offenders, was just “a drop in the buck-
et,” because those policies will mostly
affect people doing time in federal prisons.
Most offenders are locked up in local jails
and state prisons.
Local jails, state and federal prisons com-
bined house close to a million Black men.
“I’m not saying it’s a trivial thing, but
when you’ve got a million people behind
bars, a reduction of [less than 50,000] is a
good start, but it’s nothing to write home
about,” said Neal.
Neal said that if you’re a Black man 25-35
years-old without a high school diploma,
you’re about as likely to have a job as you
are to be in prison; under 25 without a high
school diploma, you’re more likely to be in
prison.
“You have to get to the 35 and above age
group, before you’re more likely to have a
job than be in prison, said Neal. “I don’t
think the typical person on the street or the
typical congressman knows how messed up
things are.”
Neal added: “It’s important to know the
truth.”