African Americans Males in Incarceration and the Contemporary Problems it Cause in the African-American Community

African-American Incarceration

African-American Race and the Criminal Justice System: The Effect on Black Communities

Racial Disparities and Incarceration

Recent studies have shown that race is a factor in the criminal justice system. For example, a study analyzing statewide sentencing outcomes in Pennsylvania for 1989-1992, found that, net of controls: (1) young black males are sentenced more harshly than any other group, (2) race is most influential in the sentencing of younger rather than older males (Steffensmeier, et al., 1998). The relationship between African-American males and the criminal justice system has been described as being no less than a crisis. In recent years policy attention regarding the crisis of the African-American male has focused on a variety of areas in which African-American males have suffered disproportionately from social ills. These have included education, housing, employment, and health care, among others. Perhaps in no other area, though, have these problems been displayed as prominently as in the realm of crime and the criminal justice system.

African-Americans have been affected in this area in two significant regards. First, African-Americans are more likely to be victimized by crime than are other groups. This creates a set of individual and community problems which impede upon other areas of productive activity. Second, the dramatic rates at which African-American males have come under some form of criminal justice supervision has created a complex set of consequences which affect not only individual victims and offenders, but families and communities as well (Mauer 1999; Spohn and Holloran, 2000).

The state of these disproportions can be seen in the following:

• 49% of prison inmates nationally are African-American, compared to their 13% share of the overall population.

• Nearly one in three (32%) black males in the age group 20-29 is under some form of criminal justice supervision on any given day -- either in prison or jail, or on probation or parole.

• As of 1995, one in fourteen (7%) adult black males was incarcerated in prison or jail on any given day, representing a doubling of this rate from 1985. The 1995 figure for white males was 1%.

• A black male born in 1991 has a 29% chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life. The figure for white males is 4%, and for Hispanics, 16%.

Prominent analyses of the overall racial composition of the prison population have been conducted by criminologist Alfred Blumstein. In an examination of the 1991 state prison population, he concluded that 76% of the higher black rate of imprisonment could be accounted for by higher rates of arrest for serious offenses. While this held true for most crimes, the critical exception in this regard was drug offenses, which will be detailed further below. The remaining 24% of disparity might be explained by criminal histories, racial bias, or other factors (Mauer, 1999).

High incarceration rates among black and low-education men have been traced to similar sources. The slim economic opportunities and turbulent living conditions of young disadvantaged and black men may lead them to crime. In addition, elevated rates of offending in poor and minority neighborhoods compound the stigma of social marginality and provoke the scrutiny of criminal justice authorities.

Research on carceral inequalities usually examines racial disparity in state imprisonment. The leading studies of Blumstein find that arrest rates -- particularly for serious offenses like homicide -- explain a large share of the black-white difference in incarceration. Because police arrests reflect crime in the population and policing effort, arrest rates are an imperfect measure of criminal involvement.

More direct measurement of the race of criminal offenders is claimed for surveys of crime victims who report the race of their assailants. Victimization data similarly suggest that the disproportionate involvement of blacks in crime explains most of the racial disparity in incarceration. These results are buttressed by research associating violent and other crime in black neighborhoods with joblessness, family disruption, and neighborhood poverty (Pettit & Western, 2004).

In short, most of the racial disparity in imprisonment is attributed to high black crime rates for imprisonable offenses Although crime rates may explain as much as

80% of the disparity in imprisonment, a significant residual suggests that blacks are punitively policed, prosecuted, and sentenced. Sociologists of punishment link this differential treatment to official perceptions of blacks as threatening or troublesome

The racial threat theory is empirically supported by research on sentencing and incarceration rates. Strongest evidence for racially differential treatment is found for some offenses and in some jurisdictions rather than at the aggregate level. African-Americans are at especially high risk of incarceration, given their arrest rates, for drug crimes and burglary. States with large white populations also tend to incarcerate blacks at a high rate, controlling for race-specific arrest rates and demographic variables. A large residual racial disparity in imprisonment thus appears due to the differential treatment of African-Americans by police and the courts (Pettit & Western, 2004).

The Effect on Black Communities (from Roberts 2004)

Measuring harms at the community level is more complex than aggregating prison's collateral consequences for individual inmates. Community harms affect more than the total number of residents who have been incarcerated. Indeed, a central focus of this research is community members other than inmates, including family members, friends, and neighbors of prisoners who suffer adverse consequences that flow beyond the prison gates. Moreover, research examining the processes by which incarceration affects communities reveals that geographic concentration affects social relationships and norms in a way that cannot be captured by aggregating individual effects.

Mass imprisonment inflicts harm at the community level not only because incarceration, experienced at high levels, has the inevitable result of removing valuable assets from the community, but also because the concentration of incarceration affects the community capacity of those who are left behind. There is a social dynamic that aggravates and augments the negative consequences to individual inmates when they come from and return to particular neighborhoods in concentrated numbers.

Three main theories explain the social mechanisms through which mass incarceration harms the African-American communities where it is concentrated: Mass imprisonment damages social networks, distorts social norms, and destroys social citizenship.

The damage to social networks starts at the family level and reverberates throughout communities where the families of prisoners are congregated. Locking up someone places an immediate financial and social strain on the rest of the family. These enormous burdens fall primarily on the shoulders of women caregivers, who customarily shore up families experiencing extreme hardship: women struggling to manage budgets consumed by addictions; women trying to hold families together when ties are weakened by prolonged absence; women attempting to manage the shame and stigma of incarceration; and women trying to prevent children from becoming casualties of the war on drugs.