14.
Chapter Two
PILLAGING THE GHETTO: OTHER CAUSES OF POVERTY
The causes of poverty are always multiple, interrelated, and
mutually reinforcing. Examining some of the forces that have shaped
the black ghetto, we must remember that separate descriptions of
individual issues cannot adequately convey their combined impact,
for each affects the other, increases the complexity, multiplies the
difficulty, pulls the web tighter, adds to the surround of force. It
is the complex sum of all these forces that is so discouraging.
"I'M NOT PREJUDICED, BUT..."
Discrimination based on skin color is still widespread in the United
States. While there has undoubtedly been progress in the last
half-century, discrimination against African Americans and other
people of color remains a powerful strand in the web that traps
ghetto residents in poverty. Until relatively recently in our
history, there has been little systematic effort to treat African
Americans equally, and the intensity of the endless history of
discrimination was a major factor in creating the ghetto
environment. Past racial discrimination is still powerfully embedded
in current social, political, and physical structures, and thus
remains a potent cause of contemporary inner-city poverty.
Discrimination itself persists, of course, most notably, in housing
and employment. In study after study, when paired couples similar to
one another in every respect except color are sent out to purchase
homes or rent housing, white couples will be shown housing that
black couples were told was unavailable and black couples will be
steered to black neighborhoods. It still remains difficult for
African Americans, especially those living in ghetto areas, to
obtain mortgage loans.
Studies of hiring practices show similar patterns. William Julius
Wilson's in-depth examination of employer attitudes in Chicago
demonstrates clearly that they are reluctant to hire young, black
men from the inner city, although they perceive black women less
negatively. It is hard to determine, however, whether this attitude
results more from racial bias or from a form of "geographic
profiling," the tendency to exclude inner-city residents based on
the belief that the ghetto is unlikely to produce acceptable
employees. This point was underscored in Wilson's study by the fact
that black employers judged this group of men just as harshly as did
white employers, viewing them not only as uneducated, but also as
unstable, uncooperative, and inherently dishonest.
Deliberately or not, employers screen out black, inner-city
applicants. They may refuse to consider otherwise adequately
qualified applicants simply because they went to urban public
schools, or they may avoid taking referrals from welfare programs or
state employment services. On the theory that friends of good
workers are more likely to be reliable than applicants pulled from
the general population, employers often look to recommendations from
their current employees when hiring for less-skilled positions. This
means that job hunters living in areas of high poverty where few of
their friends work face almost insuperable problems simply finding
out about openings. In Chicago, Wilson found, most employers do not
advertise in the classifieds. Those who do are more likely to use
ethnic, neighborhood, or suburban newspapers than citywide editions.
15.
The dialect of the black ghetto, black English vernacular, can also
lead to problems. The ability to speak, write, and communicate
effectively in standard English is essential for employment in most
white-collar jobs (meaning that most ghetto residents will be
considered only for blue-collar work). But even blue-collar
employers frequently make use of language as a screening device.
While black English vernacular has, in fact, all the rules and
grammar of any dialect, white employers in particular may interpret
its use as a reflection of lack of intelligence or ability. If he
does not speak standard English well, a prospective employee may
fail the "telephone test," never even making it to an initial
interview. While it may be easy enough to sympathize with an
employer looking for qualified applicants, from the point of view of
the job seeker, discrimination by geographic profiling is no less
virulent than a straightforward prejudice against African Americans.
It is no longer acceptable in many white circles to admit to racial
prejudice, but as recently as 1990, a National Opinion Research
survey of non-black respondents found that 65 percent thought blacks
were lazier than other groups; 56 percent thought them more prone to
violence; 53 percent saw them as less intelligent; and 78 percent
thought them less self-supporting and more likely to live off
welfare.
AMERICAN APARTHEID
The continuing severe segregation of African Americans from the rest
of society is undoubtedly the single most important cause of urban
black poverty. The ghetto itself is the problem.
Although the degree of black segregation in the United States has
declined somewhat in the last decade, African Americans in every
large northern city are still more segregated than any European
ethnic group has ever been in any American city. Sociological
analysis uses several different statistical indices of segregation.
Perhaps the most common is the "index of dissimilarity," which
calculates the percentage of a minority population that would have
to move into other neighborhoods in order to achieve an even
distribution. Imagine, for example, a city that is 20 percent black.
An even distribution, therefore, would mean that each neighborhood
was 20 percent black. The index of similarity is the percentage of
the city's blacks who would have to move to achieve that even
distribution. An index of dissimilarity less than 30 is considered
low, between 30 and 60 moderate, and above 60 high. After the Civil
War, the average indices of dissimilarity for blacks and whites in
northern cities ranged from 20 to 45, indicating levels of
segregation comparable to those of European ethnics who had recently
immigrated. By 1910, however, the average index of dissimilarity in
the black ghettos of the largest northern cities had reached almost
60, and in 1940, just before the outbreak of World War II, the
average index of dissimilarity in northern cities had soared to
almost 90, meaning that 90 percent of African Americans would have
had to move from their neighborhoods into white ones in order to
achieve perfect integration.
16.
Before 1900, the small numbers of African Americans living in
northern cities and the low levels of segregation meant that most
African Americans lived in largely white neighborhoods. Whatever
poor residential conditions they experienced were due more to
discrimination in employment than in housing. A black elite of
artisans and professionals was economically tied to the white
community, had relationships with whites in power, and generally
believed in accommodation with whites, leading, they hoped, to some
form of gradual integration someday, a position argued at the time
by Booker T. Washington. But the sheer numbers of southern blacks
who came north in the first great migration created unique problems.
Racism flared. Employers and white workers sometimes forced skilled
black craftsmen to start over as unskilled workers, while factory
owners often hired newly arrived blacks as scabs to break strikes
and prevent the establishment of unions. Unlike white immigrant
strikebreakers, however, black scabs were usually discharged at the
conclusion of the strike. The role of African Americans as
strikebreakers only increased racial tension between working-class
whites and blacks. Bombings and other violence threatened blacks,
and beginning as early as 1900 there were massive race riots. Blacks
in the "wrong" parts of a city might be attacked; whites who lived
in predominantly black areas moved out. Violence at the borders
between white and black neighborhoods kept black areas from
expanding.
Although the twentieth century's use of violence as a means of
maintaining the post–Civil War color line in northern cities crested
in the 1920s, it remained a powerful force through the middle of the
century and its use declined only gradually thereafter. The fear of
violence is still, according to polls, a major deterrent keeping
African Americans from moving into white neighborhoods. Although
overt violence is now less common, its threat, especially the threat
that one's children will be harassed or harmed, remains a potent
force for segregation.
During the 1920s, whites formed "neighborhood improvement
associations," primarily for the purpose of keeping blacks out of
their neighborhoods. They lobbied for local zoning restrictions to
close hotels and rooming houses that attracted African Americans,
and for public investments to keep property values up and thus
create economic barriers against black buyers. They organized
boycotts against realtors who sold to African Americans or against
other businesses that catered to them. Neighborhood improvement
associations collected funds to buy back property from black owners
and offered cash bonuses to black renters to induce them to leave
certain areas. Their most powerful tool was the "restrictive
covenant," by which neighborhood whites entered into voluntary
agreements that bound signers by force of law not to sell to blacks.
Facing such unified white opposition and antagonism, the black
ghetto changed, too. In the first decades of the twentieth century,
as levels of segregation increased, a new black middle class made up
of businessmen and politicians arose. Their power was born of and
depended upon the black ghetto, and they came to oppose the old
elite that had favored gradual integration and accommodation with
whites. Their new emphasis on racial solidarity and independence
found eloquent expression in the writings of W. E. B. DuBois.
17.
The new black politics that emerged differed significantly from the
traditional politics of European immigrant groups. As the existence
of many a big-city political machine and many an ethnic politician
attests, Irish, Jewish, Italian, and German immigrants all relied to
some degree on the voting and favor-granting powers to be found in
immigrant neighborhoods. Recent studies have, however, shown that
these early-twentieth-century immigrant enclaves were qualitatively
and quantitatively different from the black ghettos that had formed
in most northern cities by 1940.
Since traditional immigrant enclaves bustled with many
nationalities, and since the majority of people with a common ethnic
heritage had scattered around the city, ethnic groups historically
gained political power, in part, by forging coalitions with each
other to realize common goals. These coalitions led to other kinds
of mutual cooperation and increased the pace of ethnic integration
into the mainstream. This, in turn, meant that ethnic enclaves were
but a transitional phase of immigrant assimilation, while under the
unrelenting hostility of the larger society ghettos became a
permanent feature of black life.
African Americans, therefore, had to find their political power
largely in separation. Unlike other ethnic groups,
African-Americans’ political power came primarily from their ability
to vote as a block, under the leadership of powerful black
politicians, which meant that those politicians then had a stake in
an area's continuing segregation. In effect, if African Americans
wanted political power, they had to "take over" a particular area
and dominate its politics. Even today, much of African American
political power lies in black segregation. Rather than leading to
coalitions, this side effect of segregation can often lead to
mistrust and, ultimately, political marginalization.
By the early 1930s, the perimeters of the northern black ghetto in
most cities had been fixed, and it was difficult, if not dangerous,
for African Americans to move into white neighborhoods. Although
there were still significant numbers of whites living in black urban
neighborhoods, this, too, would change over the next two decades.
The actions of white neighborhood improvement associations, realty
practices, and violence along the borders between blacks and whites
kept those borders relatively fixed. As more African Americans moved
into the ghettos, therefore, pressure for expansion mounted. The
prices of property increased so that, paradoxically, property values
on the black side of the black-white border were sometimes much
higher than those on the white side.
In 1948, the Supreme Court declared residential segregation illegal,
specifically outlawing the restrictive covenants that white
"neighborhood improvement associations" had used so successfully to
keep out blacks. This led to a gradual increase in the permeability
of the borders of the ghetto. Permeable borders, however, hardly led
to integration, for whites would ultimately begin to move out of
neighborhoods if enough (or often any) black people moved in.
18.
Unscrupulous realtors, taking advantage of white fears, developed
the practice of "block busting" within white communities along the
borders of the ghetto. The realtor would spread rumors about a
pending black "invasion" and peddle fear of declining property
values and a black "take-over" of the community. These rumors, in
turn, enabled the realtors to buy a few properties from panicked
whites at fire-sale prices and then sell them to middle-class blacks
brave enough to integrate. Once the rumors were thus given
substance, property values fell as other whites hurried to sell and
leave. The realtors were then able to buy up the remaining white
properties cheaply and sell them to African Americans for exorbitant
profits.
The high cost of housing in the ghetto meant that once middle-class
blacks had "taken over" a formerly white area, less affluent blacks
would move in, leading to further pressure for the more affluent to
seek new areas to live in. Thus from the late 1940s into the 1960s,
the geographic area of ghettos expanded, while remaining solidly
black.
Frequently overlooked in today's rancorous debate about government
responsibility for helping the poor are the many ways in which the
federal government has subsidized the middle class. The largely
middle-class and almost exclusively white suburbanization during the
1950s and 1960s is certainly a case in point. Federally funded road
construction made easy commuting from suburban residence to urban
jobs possible. FHA and VA mortgage guarantees made home ownership
possible. Tax policy allowing deductions on home mortgage interest
payments further encouraged ownership. Such government programs and
policies were essentially subsidies to the affluent that sponsored
white flight. While such flight relieved housing pressure in the
cities and therefore allowed for the physical expansion of ghetto
areas, it had no effect on the color line, which was maintained
despite massive population shifts to the suburbs. Studies have shown
that at any moment between 1940 and 1980, whites and blacks lived in
essentially separate worlds. It would not be until the Fair Housing
Law of 1988 that the federal government gave itself both the mandate
and the tools to intervene meaningfully to prevent or at least
ameliorate residential segregation.
Whites, of course, can always avoid integration simply by moving
out. Studies have shown, in fact, that whites begin to move out of
their neighborhoods once the percentage of black residents rises
above approximately 8 percent. African Americans, on the other hand,
would rarely opt for segregation if given a real choice. While they
would not choose to be the only black family or one of very few
black families in an otherwise white neighborhood, most African
Americans would choose to live in integrated communities. The
problem, of course, is that once the percentage of black residents
reaches a point where most African Americans might feel comfortable
moving in, the white population already feels uncomfortable and has
begun moving out.
Among the least appreciated of segregation's insidious consequences
is the concentration of poverty that occurs when a population that
is poorer for any reason is also segregated. Because of their
history, persistent discrimination against them, and fewer
opportunities available to them, African Americans are, as a group,
poorer than other Americans. Segregation, therefore, forces African
Americans to live in neighborhoods that are more likely than white
neighborhoods to have a higher proportion of those who are poor.
19.
The consequences of this concentration can be significant. To take
but a single example, where more people in an area are poor, fewer
have adequate resources to maintain their property, and buildings
soon begin to show small signs of disrepair: a broken window fixed
with cardboard instead of a pane of glass, a sagging porch, peeling
paint. Other property owners are extremely sensitive to these small
signs and will view them as signals of decline, leading to reduced
incentives to keep up their own properties, which continues in a
downward spiral.
Poverty tends to be self-reinforcing, so people born into poorer
neighborhoods have a higher probability of becoming poor themselves.
PUNISHING THE CHILDREN
The concentration of poverty due to segregation has an especially
pernicious effect on the educational facilities available to those
who live in the ghetto. Because elementary and secondary schools are
funded primarily through local taxes, cities with large numbers of
poor people have fewer resources per child and, therefore, less
money to fund education. Because ghettos are politically
marginalized even within the city, local politicians can more easily
neglect education there.
Segregating poor African Americans in the ghetto means, of course,
that ghetto schools will be almost completely black and poor. Not
surprisingly, then, inner-city children bring more hunger,
homelessness, exposure to violence, and other problems to school
with them than, say, suburban students, and these "non-educational"
problems demand resources that have to be pulled away from already
meager educational allocations. Ghetto schools should be getting far
more money than suburban schools because the problems they have to
deal with tend to be more confounding and deeper. Instead, not
surprisingly, they usually get less. One current approach to improving urban education is the "magnet
school," which usually emphasizes a particular area of study like
science or the arts, and takes selected students from a district's
many schools, grouping together those who have similar interests and
abilities. Usually, these schools have more funds, are better
staffed, get more access to supplies and equipment, and maintain
better physical plants. They are of very significant benefit...to
the children who are selected. Ostensibly, children are chosen on
the basis of ability, but parents first have to know about the
possibility of applying, believe that such a school will be
worthwhile, have the time and energy to enter the application
process, possess the skills to fill out the written application, and
pay the extra fees usually involved. Unfortunately, by skimming off
the best students, the most committed or assertive parents, and
often a higher-than-average proportion of a school district's
budget, magnet schools also make the work of ordinary schools that
much more difficult.
20.
A similar weakening of the school system as a whole is the primary
danger of any of the proposed educational voucher systems. Although
certain demonstration voucher projects have successfully targeted
the most difficult inner-city students, any widespread voucher
program will also be likely to lead to the siphoning off of the
better students. Vouchers also threaten to weaken public schools
financially. Each voucher usually represents the average amount of
money the public school system spends per student. Parents can use
it to pay tuition or partial tuition at any school, public or
private, that will accept the child. Although not true of all
parochial schools, most private schools cost far more than the
amount of a voucher for "average public school costs." Poor families
unable to afford the added expense will not benefit, nor will the
children of parents who, for whatever reason, cannot hunt out
alternative schooling, nor will children who cannot get accepted at
a private or parochial school. Since voucher money would be
withdrawn from public systems, which have large fixed costs in
buildings, maintenance, equipment, and teacher contracts, the danger
is that the public schools that remain will have even less adequate
funding, while having to educate many of the most difficult students
who require the highest level of resources.
In its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision ratifying the legality of
segregation in public facilities, the Supreme Court created the
doctrine of "separate but equal." Schools could be segregated as
long as the education provided to black students was equal to that
provided white students. Justice John Marshall Harlan, in a bitter
dissent from that decision, noted that given the social and economic
inequality between blacks and whites in the United States at that
time, "separate" would never be "equal," a prediction amply realized
in the next century. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the
Supreme Court recognized the failure of "separate but equal" and
demanded the integration of public schools. Almost fifty years
later, as Jonathan Kozol has pointed out, we have not only failed to
meet the conditions of the 1954 decision, we have also failed to
meet the conditions of the 1896 decision. Schools are still largely
separate and unequal.
A Black Alliance for Educational Options nationwide study released
in 2001 revealed that in fifteen of the forty-five largest school
districts studied (including New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and
Memphis) fewer than half of African-American students graduated from
high school with a regular diploma. Without a decent education, a
child is handicapped for life.
SICK AND POOR
According to the United States Census, in 2000 over 38 million
Americans (14 percent) did not have health insurance at any time
during the entire year. We tend to assume that if people are poor
enough, they are eligible for some kind of governmental health
coverage. That assumption is wrong. Less than one-third of the
people living in poverty are even eligible for Medicaid, the primary
form of health insurance available to the poor, and the rate of
the uninsured among poor people is over twice as high as among the
general population. The low-paying jobs available to poor people
rarely offer health insurance coverage as a benefit. It is, of
course, out of the question for poor people to purchase health
insurance on their own. Even modestly comprehensive family policies
currently cost more than $650 a month, half the total income of a
family of three living at the poverty level, so they remain largely
uninsured. This means that in any sort of health emergency the poor
must spend a significant percentage of their income on clinic or
emergency room visits, especially when young children are involved.
21.
Even those who do qualify for Medicaid must undergo an application
process that can be arduous and discouraging. Until the 1996 passage
of the legislation known as Welfare Reform, most poor families who
received what we usually think of as welfare (Aid to Families with
Dependent Children, or AFDC) received Medicaid automatically.
Because more than half of these families have been moved off the
rolls, they must apply separately for Medicaid, a process that can,
in some states, prove virtually impossible for a person who must go
to work each day to complete.
Once covered by Medicaid, the poor face a sometimes-insurmountable
hurdle: finding a doctor who will accept Medicaid payment. Although
patterns vary from state to state, fewer and fewer doctors or
hospitals accept Medicaid, largely because reimbursement is usually
low, so those who are poor must usually go to hospital emergency
rooms or public clinics for their care. But hospitals are not good
places to receive routine health care, although they generally
handle emergencies well, even for the poor. In fact, federal law
requires that any hospital admit and care for emergency patients
regardless of ability to pay, but it is now an unusual hospital that
offers indigent patients much in the way of continuing care,
preventive medicine, or help with routine medical problems. Patients
with such problems are increasingly triaged out of emergency rooms.
Public clinics can be excellent sources of health care for the
patients they accept, but they rarely have the staff or other
resources to provide care, much less follow-up, to all who need it.
Waits are often long, a different doctor may be seen each time, and
there is often no special provision for paying for other needed
services like x-rays, lab work, or hospitalization, which can be
enormously expensive. And even public hospitals and clinics often
try to recoup whatever charges they can from poor clients. So
although hospitals may not follow up with aggressive collection
routines, patients receive bills anyway.
Thus cost prevents appropriate health care, leading to both poorer
health and further poverty. The relationships between health and
poverty, however, are complex, for each affects the other. The
health of poor people is measurably worse than average: infant
mortality, the single most commonly used indicator of population
health, is 60 percent greater (and the death rate for newborns is
twice as high) for families with incomes below the poverty level
than for those above it. Many forms of cancer are more common among
the poor. Individuals earning less than $9,000 annually have death
rates three to seven times higher (depending on race and gender)
than those earning $25,000 or more per year. Poor prenatal care or
maternal malnutrition can each lead to learning disabilities and
decreased cognitive abilities in children, which in turn can
contribute to poor educational achievement, further complicating the
experience of poverty.
22.
We know intuitively that poverty can lead to poor health, but
research over the last decade has documented that even economic
inequality has a separate association with poor health. Studies
comparing countries with similar standards of living, for instance,
have found that in those with greater levels of economic inequality
the health of the entire population (not just the poor) is worse.
Similar studies comparing different states in the United States have
come up with the same results. The size of the gap between rich and
poor matters as well. According to the World Health Organization,
the United States, despite its status as the richest country in the
world, ranks thirty-second among all nations in the "equality of
child survival," a measurement of the distribution of health among
different populations within a country. The United States ranks
twenty-fourth in life expectancy, and thirty-second in infant
mortality, the two most common measures of the health of a
population. Over the last twenty-five years, as inequality in our
country has increased, we have dropped even further in the rankings.
Not only poverty, but also inequality decimates the health of our
people.
Examples of poor health among the poor are everywhere: congenital
disease and infant AIDS are far more common among the poor, as are
the chronic diseases of childhood. Lead poisoning, asthma,
malnutrition, anemia, and chronic middle ear infections are not only
expensive to diagnose and treat, but can also lead to permanent
impairment. Poor children are twice as likely as affluent children
to suffer lead poisoning, for instance, and the long-term,
deleterious effects on the brain of lead deposits are well known.
Severely poisoned children may suffer seizures, coma, and mental
retardation, but even those with milder degrees of lead poisoning
are at risk for learning and behavior problems. Language acquisition
can be delayed, hyperactivity may result, motor coordination may be
affected, aggressive or impulsive behavior is more common, and
children may have generalized difficulty learning. In addition to
being severe problems in their own right, all these symptoms lead to
difficulties in school. These difficulties are compounded when the
schools in the poor areas lack the capacity to give the individual
attention needed; these children may do poorly or drop out
altogether. Lead poisoning means that a child enters the challenge
of adulthood in the ghetto even less prepared than peers to cope
with it.
Childhood asthma has increased dramatically over the last thirty
years. Both poverty and inner-city residence are independent risk
factors for asthma, and poor African-American children are more than
twice as likely to get asthma as other non-poor children and more
than four times as likely to be hospitalized. The death rate from
asthma is four times higher among African Americans than among whites. Asthma is not only a serious, potentially
life-threatening illness in itself, but among chronic health
conditions it causes the most school absences. It is the second
leading cause of hospitalization for children aged five to nine and
may account for a third of all emergency room visits. For the
uninsured, the several medications often combined to treat asthma
are prohibitively expensive. Asthma becomes highly disruptive to the
life of the child and his or her family, adding further chaos to
their lives.
While measuring "hunger" is necessarily subjective, the United
States Department of Agriculture's annual survey of hunger reports
that approximately ten million U.S. households, (accounting for 18
percent of the children) are "food insecure" at some point during
the year, meaning that they do not have access to enough food to
meet their basic needs. Over three million of these households
experience hunger at some point during the year. On any given night,
562,000 American children go to bed hungry. Compared to other
low-income children whose families do not experience food shortages,
hungry children suffer from over twice as many individual health
problems: unwanted weight loss, fatigue, headaches, irritability,
inability to concentrate, and frequent colds.
23.
Iron deficiency anemia is also a common result. In the middle-class
rural community where I practiced for seven years, anemia was rare.
I was shocked, upon moving to the inner city, to discover that well
over a third of my young inner-city patients were anemic. Average
hemoglobin levels (measuring anemia) were significantly lower than
those of my rural patients. All of the symptoms of hunger,
especially when exacerbated by anemia, mean that hungry children are
less able to cope with the difficulties of their environment. School
performance suffers, with the expected consequences on future
earning power.
Sometimes these health problems exacerbate poverty in surprising
ways. Consider middle-ear infections (otitis media). Normal acute
ear infections cause pain and lead to emergency doctor visits, where
they can usually be treated easily. Sometimes, however, acute otitis
media leads to chronic otitis media that may have few symptoms and
be detectable only by medical examination. If, as often happens
among the poor, the acute, painful episodes are insufficiently
monitored through follow-up visits, the chronic otitis media may go
undetected. For financial reasons, for instance, a poor child is
less likely to revisit the doctor after her acute ear infection
seems to have gotten better, so the chronic form remains
undiagnosed. This chronic otitis can cause a temporary loss of
hearing, which may persist through early childhood. Undiagnosed
hearing loss often leads to poor school performance, and so to
permanent educational deficiencies, making it that much harder to
escape poverty as an adult.
Every illness, of course, makes it more difficult to cope with one's
environment, so the poor health status of poor children becomes a
permanent impairment. The surround of force seems inescapable.
In addition, the poor are much more likely to live and work in
conditions that are detrimental to health. A friend of mine, for
instance, cannot afford to move out of her damp basement apartment
although the mold spores it breeds severely aggravate her daughter's
asthma.
Finally, the stress of simply being poor has been documented to be a
real health risk.
The poor get it coming and going.
24.
A SECOND GHETTO: PRISON
Over the last twenty-five years, "law and order" has become a
politically potent slogan. The impact of the generally bipartisan
demand for "law and order" began to be felt in the early 1980s, when
both state legislatures and Congress started to write into law not
only lengthier sentences for various crimes, but also "mandatory
minimum" sentences. Such laws took from judges the discretion they
had previously had in the sentencing process, when they could
consider the particular circumstances of the offense committed and
of the person who committed it. The result has been a substantial
increase in the average length of time served in prison. At both
federal and state levels, "three strikes" laws have been passed that
mandate sentences of twenty-five years to life for the third felony
offense. In states like California, these three strikes can be for
relatively minor offenses, including drug possession. More people
there have been sentenced under the three-strikes law for simple
marijuana possession than for murder, rape, and kidnapping combined,
and more for drug possession generally than for all violent
offenses. A young man was recently sentenced to a minimum of
twenty-five years for his third conviction—this time for stealing a
bicycle.
These and other new laws have brought about staggering increases in
the size of our inmate population. In 1971, there were fewer than
200,000 people in America's state and federal prisons. By 2001, that
number had grown almost to 1.4 million, or close to a seven-fold
increase. If local jails, youth facilities, military prisons, and
other forms of imprisonment are included, on any given day over two
million Americans are incarcerated, a rate of 736 inmates per
100,000 population. This rate is the highest in the world. Only
Russia (with a rate of 675 per 100,000) and other countries of the
former Soviet Union even come close to our propensity to
incarcerate. Other Western democracies average between 55 and 120
per 100,000, that is, between one-sixth and one-twelfth of the
American rate. Japan incarcerates only 36 per 100,000, approximately
one-twentieth of our rate.
Even these figures pale next to the staggering incarceration rates
within the African-American community. In the year 2000, roughly one
out of every three black males between eighteen and thirty-four
years of age was under the active supervision of the criminal
justice system: under arrest, awaiting trial, awaiting sentencing,
on probation, in jail or prison, in half-way houses or other
mandated programs, or on parole. In Washington, D.C., half of all
young black men are currently in the criminal justice system. In
nearby Baltimore, it's even worse. These figures include only those
currently in the system. If we also count those who have previously
been in the system and have now been released, the numbers are even
higher. How did this happen? And what has been the impact of these
extraordinary incarceration rates on urban life?
The reasons for such high numbers of African Americans in the
criminal justice system are complex. Certainly, proportionately
higher percentages of poor blacks commit crimes for which we
ordinarily send people to jail, especially drug offenses, but also
burglary, robbery, assault, and murder. It is also true, however,
that we tend to punish the kinds of crimes committed by the poor
more severely than similar ones committed by affluent people.
Compare, for example, shoplifting and "fudging" on an expense
account. Each is a nonviolent crime against business. Since neither
source of income is usually reported to the Internal Revenue
Service, each is a federal crime. Yet the shoplifter is much more
likely to be prosecuted than the executive manipulating his expense
account.
25.
Some of the overwhelming increase in incarceration is certainly
connected to the increase in rates of violent crime between the end
of the 1960s, when social conditions in the ghetto began to
deteriorate, and 1992, when those rates suddenly started declining,
but that's only part of the story. A large part of the increase in
incarceration rates over the last generation has had to do with
increased length of sentences for less serious crimes. Comparison
with European countries supports both explanations. Violent crime
levels are generally higher in the United States than in Europe, but
it is also true that both our "propensity to incarcerate" and the
length of an average sentence for less serious, non-violent crimes
like drug possession or burglary are greater in the United Slates
than in other Western industrial countries. While exact comparisons
are difficult to make because crime and punishment statistics in
various countries are kept differently, prison sentences in the
United States are on average more than two to three times those in
European countries for these lesser crimes. Paradoxically, for
violent crimes like murder or armed robbery, our sentences—with the
notable exception of capital punishment, of course—are closer to
those in Europe.
One of the ways in which the criminal justice system weighs more
heavily on the poor—especially people of color—is the process of
plea bargaining, through which many run-of-the-mill street-crime
prosecutions are resolved. In fact, the mandatory minimum sentence
that has taken power away from the judge has for practical purposes
transferred that power to the prosecuting attorney, who decides not
only what charges will be brought against defendants, but also
whether or not to prosecute in federal court, where sentencing
standards are more severe than in most state courts. Thus, the
prosecuting attorney has the authority to offer a plea bargain for,
say, a one- or two-year sentence versus facing trial on a charge
that might carry a mandatory minimum of twenty years. It often seems
in the best interests of even those who are innocent to plead guilty
and take the lesser sentence. The lack of time and resources at the
disposal of the public defenders assigned to help the poor means a
further tilt toward convicting the poor, only adding to the accused's incentive to accept a plea bargain.
There can be no doubt, however, that the war on drugs has been the
major cause of the increase in incarceration of black inner-city
residents. "Declared" in the early 1980s, the emphasis of this war
nationwide has been on law enforcement and the incarceration of drug
offenders, not on prevention and treatment. It has also concentrated
drug law enforcement on inner-city areas and instituted harsher
sentencing policies, particularly for crack cocaine. Thanks to this
war (which has in truth been largely a war on the poor), between
1985 and 1995 the number of black state prison inmates sentenced for
drug offenses rose by more than 700 percent. In recent years there
has also been a dramatic increase in the number of drug cases heard
in federal court, as prosecuting attorneys have exercised their
authority to bring more offenders under the scope of the more severe
federal mandatory minimum penalties.
26.
Once in the criminal justice system, African Americans are usually
treated more harshly than other racial groups. The most notorious
example is in sentencing for crack cocaine offenses. Crack cocaine
and powder cocaine have the same chemical composition, and powder
cocaine can easily be transformed into equal weights of crack.
Crack, however, is marketed in smaller, less expensive quantities
and has, therefore, more often been used by those in low-income and
minority communities; whereas powder cocaine is more likely to be
used by the affluent. In federal court and in many state courts, the
penalty for selling five grains of crack cocaine is the same
five-year mandatory minimum sentence as the sentence for selling
five hundred grams of powder cocaine. Despite the fact that
two-thirds of crack users are white or Hispanic, 86 percent of all
offenders sentenced in federal court for crack offences are African
American.
Both liberal and conservative criminologists agree that any
reduction in drug-related crime caused by our vast increases in
imprisonment for drug offenses, while difficult to measure with any
certainty, is either small or negligible. Indeed, some have argued
that imprisonment makes ex-offenders more likely to use drugs again,
because they come out of prison so poorly prepared to reenter
society. While the war on drugs has increased incarceration rates
for all groups, the increase for black men has been
disproportionate. While African Americans are only 12 percent of the
population and 13 percent of the drug users, they are 35 percent of
those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of those convicted of
drug possession, and an incredible 74 percent of those actually
jailed for drug possession.
In other words, an African-American drug user is almost twenty times
more likely to spend time in prison for his offense than is any
other drug user.
Drug treatment both within and outside the criminal justice system
would clearly be more cost-effective in controlling drug abuse and
crime than the continued expansion of the prison system. The RAND
foundation, a not-for-profit, non-partisan research foundation for
the study of military, social, and economic issues, estimated, for
instance, that every dollar spent on drug treatment would reduce
drug use eight times more than spending the same dollar to expand
the use of mandatory sentencing for drug offenders. Similarly,
expanding the use of treatment has been estimated to reduce
drug-related crime up to fifteen times as much as mandatory
sentencing. Studies of drug treatment for the incarcerated have also
shown that those who receive drug treatment are significantly less
likely to return to prison for another offense than those who do
not. Unfortunately, few prisoners receive drug treatment, just as
few poor drug users have access to effective drug treatment programs
of any sort.
There is no doubt that we need a strong and efficient criminal
justice system. There are dangerous people we must remove-- at least
temporarily-- from society. The question is not whether we are "soft"
or "tough" on violent crime, but whether the profound increase in
incarceration over the last generation has accomplished what it
promised. The question is what works and what does not, what will
bring real public safety and what only appears to do so. With the
deterioration of the social safety net (over the last twenty years
government spending for almost every anti-poverty program except
Medicaid has decreased), the prison has become our social policy: our
employment initiative, our drug treatment program, our mental health
policy, our anti-poverty effort, and our program for children in
trouble.
27.
In 1997, the latest year for which Justice Department statistics are
available, the cost of incarceration to local, state, and federal
government was $130 billion, 3.6 times the amount spent in 1982, and
these figures continue to increase 8 percent per year. Journalist
Christian Parenti reports in his book Lockdown America that more
than a half-million people work in corrections, making it larger
than any Fortune 500 employer except General Motors. Seven billion
dollars a year is spent building new prisons. Poor rural areas vie
for them, and then they immediately become central to the local
economy. Five percent of rural population growth between 1980 and
1990 came from prisoners, captured mostly in the cities.
Prisons-- including the one out of twenty that are private and
for-profit-- are big business, making it all that much harder, given
the ever-greater vested interests in the system, to extricate
ourselves from the present morass.
Meanwhile, federal spending on jobs and job training plummets and
opportunities for drug treatment disappear. Poverty is correlated
with crime, but every extra dollar spent on local, state, and
federal penal institutions is a dollar less to spend on the
prevention and eradication of poverty. It's not that we don't have
other options. Because children who have been abused are far more
likely to commit violent crimes later in their life than those who
have not, programs working with at-risk families to prevent child
abuse have been shown to lower the likelihood of future violent
crimes-- sometimes dramatically. Timely intervention for young
children at risk of impaired cognitive development, behavior
problems, and early failure in school can also reduce the likelihood
of violent crime, as can programs to intervene in the lives of
at-risk adolescents and adolescents who have already had trouble
with the law.
There are also enormous hidden costs in our race to incarcerate,
costs hidden because they are charged to the ghetto. Keeping half of
the young black men in Washington under the supervision of the
criminal justice system has devastating consequences. For those
actually incarcerated, of course, employment is impossible. One must
give up any job one had to go to jail. Most of those on probation or
parole are legally allowed to work, but when a criminal record is
added to low educational attainment and limited job experience, work
proves even harder to come by. Licensing requirements prohibit the
formerly incarcerated from some forms of work. Joseph's House, where
I work, cares for homeless men with AIDS. A year ago, the City
Council passed a law prohibiting any facility like ours from hiring
most people with criminal records-- even after they have served their
time. For such men who, under the best of circumstances, would have
difficulty finding work, the criminal justice system adds but one
more impediment to any attempt to climb out of poverty. Soon, they
just give up looking. In the jargon of sociologists, they are no
longer "attached to the labor force," and so, in a final irony, they
are not even counted among the unemployed, effectively lowering the
real unemployment rate. If those incarcerated were counted, the
overall unemployment rate for black men would increase by about
two-thirds. Many states, in a further gesture of exclusion, prohibit
felons from voting, temporarily or permanently. Anyone with a felony
conviction for a drug offense is now prohibited from receiving a
federal loan for education, making college an even more unrealistic
dream.
28.
The imprisonment of some violent offenders, of course, provides
benefits to the ghetto community in reduced crime, for it must be
remembered that poor-on-poor crime is far more common and far more
devastating than poor-on-rich crime. But the benefits of
imprisonment for less serious crimes, especially low-level drug
selling or possession, are far less clear. Imprisonment also
deprives children of fathers, women of husbands and partners, and
the community of human resources that could provide positive
benefits, including the supervision of young people and other
elements of informal social control. As more young people grow up
having parents and siblings and friends who are incarcerated, jail
time comes to be seen as a normal aspect of the life experience, and
the deterrent effect of prison is diminished.
The impact on the ghetto community of this vast increase in the
incarceration of African Americans has been devastating.
WORKING AND POOR
A major change in the face of American poverty over the last
generation has involved the loss of the sorts of jobs on which
less-skilled workers might have once supported themselves and their
families. Between 1963 and 2000, the inflation-adjusted average wage
of college-educated men has gone from $38,310 to $53,457, a gain of
37 percent. During that same period, the average wage of men who
dropped out of high school has fallen from $24,717 to $18,953
(despite a booming economy from 1993-2000), a loss of more than 23
percent, and barely enough to raise a family of four to the official
poverty line. The wages of low-skilled women are roughly half those
of low-skilled men, although because they were so very poorly paid a
generation ago, women's wages have actually risen since 1963. In
2000, for example, the average wage of women who dropped out of high
school was $9,996, barely enough to raise a single person-- to say
nothing of a family-- out of poverty.
In the same years, non-wage compensation-- primarily health insurance
and retirement benefits-- has declined for all but the highest-paid
employees. The less skilled have been especially hard hit. Few of
the jobs available to people with little formal education and
limited work skills provide benefits, only increasing the
desperation of the situation that the statistics on wages already
reveal.
Because of the globalization of the economy, there seems to be a
decreased demand for less-skilled workers across the country.
Workers in the United States now compete directly with workers in
underdeveloped countries, and corporations have too often chosen to
move less-skilled jobs out of the country. As a result of decreased
demand, wages have declined just as the technological skills
required by many companies have risen, leaving the ill-educated,
technologically untrained poor behind.
29.
The major policy implication of this profound erosion of wages and
compensation among less-skilled workers is that we can no longer
count on an expanding economy or even near-full employment to bring
people out of poverty. During the 1960s, strong economic growth
meant a dramatic fall in poverty as the unemployed went back to work
and real wages rose. During the 1980s and 1990s, with similarly
strong economic growth, the drop in poverty was minimal. Full-time
work no longer guarantees escape from poverty, as the recent results
of Welfare Reform have so amply demonstrated. The implications of
this fact have not yet registered in government policy. |