In 1965, a growing tide of Black male joblessness spurred the prediction by then Assistant U.S. Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan that the Black family would experience considerable disruption in the coming years. Moynihan’s famous analysis, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” had stated that the Black family, “battered and harassed by discrimination,” was “the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community.”
For law professor and author Michelle Alexander, the mass incarceration of Black men stemming from the prosecution of the “War on Drugs” has created social conditions among African-Americans far more devastating than what Moynihan predicted 48 years ago. “It’s been said that things have worsened since the Moynihan Report was released, and I would say that is a considerable understatement,” she said Friday at the Urban Institute think tank and Fathers Incorporated organization policy forum, “Black Families Five Decades after the Moynihan Report.”
“A revolution has occurred since Moynihan issued the so-called infamous report. A new caste system has emerged in poor communities of color—a caste system that has resulted in not only millions being locked up and permanently locked out, but a caste system that has managed to destroy [and] decimate Black families in the United States,” Alexander told forum attendees in a riveting keynote speech.
Alexander, author of the widely-praised The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and an Ohio State University law professor, said the nation passed up the opportunity to help create better social conditions for Blacks and others. Instead of pursuing policies that might have made it possible to stem the tide of joblessness that has disproportionately curtailed opportunities for Black men over the past half century, the U.S. pursued criminal justice policies that has seen the nation’s prison population swell from 300,000 to well over 2 million, she noted.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, non-Hispanic Blacks accounted for 39.4 percent of the total prison and jail population in 2009. In 2010 Black males were imprisoned at the rate of 4,347 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents of the same race and gender. White males were incarcerated at the rate of 678 inmates per 100,000 U.S. White male residents and Hispanic males were incarcerated at the rate of 1,755 inmates per 100,000 U.S. Hispanic male residents.
Noting that studies have shown that Blacks consume illicit drugs at a rate roughly comparable to other racial and ethnic groups, Alexander pointed to the disproportionately high prosecution of Black males for non-violent drug offenses as a significant factor in the high rate of Black male incarceration.
“In the years since the Moynihan Report, we’ve made a profound choice. Rather than good schools, we have built high-tech prisons. Rather than create good jobs and invest in the communities that need it most, we have embarked upon an unprecedented race to incarcerate that has left millions of Americans locked up and locked out,” she said.
