Report: Progress for Back Men Stalled

Report: Progress for Back Men Stalled

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Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - From the U. S. president to millionaire athletes, these appear to be halcyon days for Black men.

Forty years ago, only a fiction writer could imagine that the nation’s leader would ever be a person of color or that a Fortune 500 company like American Express would ever consider having a Black chief executive.

Today, the growth of Black elected officials and decision-makers shows the remarkable advances that Black men have made in government as well as in business, science, sports, education, entertainment and a host of other areas.

But dig deeper into the statistics for Average Joes, and the picture is of stalled progress overall.

Soaring incarceration rates in the past 25 years and the surge in unemployment during the Great Recession have left Black men, in general, still clinging to the bottom rung of the economic ladder, the same place they were in 1974 and earlier, according to a new report by researchers at the University of Chicago.

Derek Neal and Armin Rick, the co-authors of the report, found that so-called reforms in the criminal justice system have stifled the general advance of Black males and made them more vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment.

Education is a prime example. By 1989, 25 years after passage of the door-opening Civil Rights Act, Black men were rapidly closing the gap with White in completed years of schooling.

Instead of the four-year difference of the 1960s and 1970s, Black adults ages 26 to 35 had by 1989, on average, completed just one year less of school than their White counterparts, while record numbers of Black high school graduates were enrolling in college, technical schools and other higher education training.

However, the impact of increased incarceration has changed the picture. Between 1989 and 2014, the gap in Black-White educational attainment has stopped shrinking and instead widened to nearly 1970s levels, the two researchers found.

They cited continuing wide Black-White differences in math and reading scores on standardized and college placement tests as well as the widening gap in educational attainment.

The rise in incarceration also correlates with lowered employment rates for Black men, particularly since 2008, the researchers found: “Relative to white men in the labor market, black men are in no better a situation than they were in 1974.”

Incarceration is the key factor, the report found. Prisoner numbers have soared in the wake of federal and state policies imposed in the 1980s and 1990s to crack down on crime, including parole abolition, enhanced sentencing guidelines ad three-strike laws that ensure near lifetime imprisonment for repeat offenders.

The report states such policy changes – fueled by grants for prison building – accounted for more than 70 percent of the growth in the prison population between 1986 and 2006. The United States now leads the world in locking up people, with 2.2 million behind bars.

Not surprisingly, Black men have been affected the most, the study noted. Given historical patterns of discrimination, they remain more likely to be arrested, to be convicted and to be sentenced to longer terms than White men.

Combined, local jails and state and federal prisons today house close to a million Black men. Overall, one in four Black males are behind bars or on probation or parole on any given day, according to this report and other studies.

The higher arrest rates, the report stated, are reflected in labor market data. The data show Black men age 21 and over have the highest rate of unemployment among all able-bodied adults.

According to the Labor Department, the most recent data show the unemployment rate for Black men was 10.9 percent compared to 4.9 percent for White men. (Black women, too, have nearly double the unemployment rate of White women, 9 percent to 4.8 percent.)

The picture could change in coming years, the report indicated. The decline in crime rates plus the Great Recession appear to be forcing the debt-ridden federal government and cash-strapped states to re-examine costly prison policies, the report noted.

Now the federal government and states are looking for ways to reduce prison costs by promoting diversion programs, potentially leading to lower incarceration rates down the road. Still, the impact of those policies will continue to be felt for years on the success rates for Black children and adults, the report concluding.