DISPROPORTIONATE IMPRISONMENT OF BLACK MEN

Are black men imprisoned in disproportionate numbers because they are criminals, victims of a discriminatory society, or both?

Here are some excerpts from On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman:

Prisoners are drawn disproportionately from poor and segregated Black communities.

Black people make up 13 percent of the US population, but account for 37 percent of the prison population. Among Black young men, one in nine are in prison, compared with less than 2 percent of white young men. These racial differences are reinforced by class differences. It is poor Black young men who are being sent to prison at truly astounding rates: approximately 60 percent of those who did not finish high school will go to prison by their mid-thirties.

An overwhelming majority of men going to prison are poor, and a disproportionate number are Black. Today, 30 percent of Black men without college educations have been to prison by their mid-thirties. One in four Black children born in 1990 had an imprisoned father by the time he or she turned fourteen.

In my opinion, there are a disproportionate number of black men in prison because they commit a disproportionate number of crimes. But, when poor blacks are literally forced to live in crime infested ghettos, many of them are destined to be imprisoned. And those ghettos exist because ours is a discriminatory society.

Goffman mentions that 30 percent of black men without college educations have been to prison by their mid-30s. She could also have pointed out that school-age ghetto dwellers attend substandard segregated schools, and those who bother to graduate from high school cannot read or write, and cannot do simple math – add, subtract, multiply or divide. That keeps many blacks from getting any well-paying jobs, and in order to make money, they burgle, rob and sell dope.

Thus it would be logical to conclude that those blacks are imprisoned because, first and foremost, they are criminals. But they are also victims of a discriminatory society.