The other telling part is that there is a racial disparity about who is locked up. What does that say about our country? Oh sure there are some who say that white people are more law abiding and so under represented in prison. I work in an urban setting and it is clearly true that there is a racial disparity between those who go to prison. But there is also a racial disparity in family life, in jobs, in neighborhoods, in available services, and most importantly, available resourses to address the issues.
While it may be true that the US is no longer segregated in stores, resturants, and transportation, racial discrimination is still pervasive in America. Indeed, racial prejudice is two sided, both sides see little in common and so turn inward away from the other, creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of distance and alienation. Within urban racial subcultures, many adolescents expect to be excluded from the mainstream and have too many role models that are entangled in drugs, crime, and violence. Kids will find heroes like them. There are too few in the mainstream they can identify with, often because their sub-culture is so far out of the mainstream.
A good example is the "Cool Pose" sub-culture among young adolescent male African Americans. Born out of the despair of distance and opportunities, black kids see the lifestyle
as simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.
Not only was living this subculture immensely fulfilling, the boys said, it also brought them a great deal of respect from white youths. This also explains the otherwise puzzling finding by social psychologists that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.
I call this the Dionysian trap for young black men. The important thing to note about the subculture that ensnares them is that it is not disconnected from the mainstream culture. To the contrary, it has powerful support from some of America's largest corporations. Hip-hop, professional basketball and homeboy fashions are as American as cherry pie. Young white Americans are very much into these things, but selectively; they know when it is time to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book.
[...]For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.
The tragedy unfolding in our inner cities is a time-slice of a deep historical process that runs far back through the cataracts and deluge of our racist past. Most black Americans have by now, miraculously, escaped its consequences. The disconnected fifth languishing in the ghettos is the remains. Too much is at stake for us to fail to understand the plight of these young men. For them, and for the rest of us.
It's not just the African American youth, you see it in every urban center. Every neighborhood has it's gang, most often racially based, focused on a very similar variant of the anti-social sub-culture.
Few talk publically about the issue, for fear of stoking the passions of racism, with massive finger pointing across the divide, amplifying the problem. The problem IS the divide. The sooner we recognize we are all part of the same family, the human family, the sooner we'll be able to address these problems. Alienation is fed by rejection. A child who grows up in an overstressed drug abusing household, feels used and deprived of what he needs to grow into a healthy adult. It's pretty hard to imagine life beyond the one he's known. So the cycle begins again.
We are each others best hope. It's only as a community that we can hope to break the cycle. We can't afford financially or culturally the consequential tear in the fabric of our community.
washingtonpost.com
A record 7 million people -- one in every 32 U.S. adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, a Justice Department report released yesterday shows. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to the report.
More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more.
Men still far outnumber women in prisons and jails, but the female population is growing faster. Over the past year, the female population in state or federal prison increased 2.6 percent and the number of male inmates rose 1.9 percent. By year's end, 7 percent of inmates were women. The gender figures do not include inmates in local jails.
"Misguided policies that create harsher sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of women in prisons and jails," Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that supports criminal justice reform, said in a statement.
From 1995 to 2003, inmates incarcerated in federal prisons for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth.
The study found that racial disparities among prisoners persist. In the 25-29 age group, 8.1 percent of black men -- about one in 13 -- are incarcerated, compared with 2.6 percent of Hispanic men and 1.1 percent of white men. The figures are not much different among women. By the end of 2005, black women were more than twice as likely as Hispanics and more than three times as likely as white women to be in prison.
There were significant changes in some states' prison populations. In South Dakota, the number of inmates increased 11 percent over the past year, more than in any other state. Montana and Kentucky were next, with increases of 10.4 and 7.9 percent, respectively. Georgia had the biggest decrease, losing 4.6 percent of its prison population, followed by Maryland (2.4 percent decrease) and Louisiana (2.3 percent).
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