NUMBER OF BLACKS IN PRISON NEARS 1 MILLION

'We're incarcerating an entire generation of people'

WASHINGTON -- Come the new millennium, the number of African American adults
behind bars will hit the million mark for the first time, according to an
analysis of Justice Department statistics. That represents nearly an
eightfold increase from three decades ago, when there were 133,226 blacks in
prison.

By 2000, roughly one in 10 black men will be in prison -- a statistic with
major social implications because prisoners don't have jobs, pay taxes or
care for their children at home. And because many states bar felons from
voting, at least one in seven black men will have lost the right to vote.

"These numbers are staggering," said Laurie Levensen, a former federal
prosecutor and associate dean of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "We're
incarcerating an entire generation of people."

Why blacks constitute about half of all prison inmates when they are only 13
percent of the U.S. population is subject to much speculation. Some
specialists blame poverty or lack of opportunity. Others say police
concentrate in poor urban areas because street crimes such as drug dealing
and armed robbery are more visible, and residents there demand more police
protection.

The bottom line is that crime policy has become a substitute for public
policy, said Jerome Miller, president of the National Center on Institutions
and Alternatives, an Arlington, Va., legal reform group that analyzed the
Justice Department data.

"Over the past 20 years, there has been a terrible propensity on the part of
politicians to deal with difficult economic, social, family and personal
problems with a meat ax -- the criminal-justice system," said Miller, a
former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services.

Over the past five decades, the disparity between races has widened
dramatically as minorities have replaced whites in the prison population,
according to the center.

In 1950, whites made up about 65 percent of all state and federal inmates,
while minorities made up 35 percent. Today, the opposite is true, with 35
percent of the prison population made up of whites.

In Washington state, blacks make up 23 percent of the inmate population in
the state Department of Corrections, while constituting just 3.4 percent of
the state population, state officials say.

American Indians make up 3.2 percent of the state prison population while
representing 1.9 percent of the general population. Asians account for 2.4
percent of the state prison population and 5.9 percent of the general
population.

Those of Hispanic origin (who may also be counted among the other
categories) make up about 13 percent of the state prison population and 6
percent of the general population.

"The face of crime to white Americans is now that of a black man," said
David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Center for Political and
Economic Studies, a think tank that specializes in black community issues.

"It means 10 percent of (black men) are not productive," said Massachusetts
state Rep. Byron Rushing, a Boston Democrat. "Not only are their talents not
available for development of the community, but the community spends a large
amount of time dealing with their absence."

"There are so many people in the community going to prison you start to have
the welfare effect, where it becomes acceptable -- a rite of passage -- for
African American men to go to prison," said Hilary Shelton, director of the
Washington bureau of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People.

Another concern is the mass disenfranchisement of African Americans.

According to an October 1998 report by The Sentencing Project, a
Washington-based legal research and services organization, in a dozen
states, 30 percent to 40 percent of the next generation of black men will
permanently lose the right to vote if current trends continue. In nine
states, one in four black men can never vote again because they were
convicted of a felony.

Upon release from prison in Washington state, felons automatically lose the
right to vote. They may petition the state for reinstatement of that right,
according to Veltry Johnson, public information chief for the state
Department of Corrections.

This loss of voting rights nationwide not only highlights the eroding
political power base of blacks, but it also calls into question the notion
of democracy in America, Shelton said.

Some sociologists say the explanation lies in high rates of poverty. African
Americans are more likely to end up with a prison term because they can't
afford a good legal defense team, or a "sentencing consultant" who can help
reduce time spent locked up.

Lack of opportunity plays a role as well, they say, pointing out that the
vast majority of inmates are functionally illiterate, which means they can't
even fill out a job application.

More money for alleviating poverty, however, is not the answer, said Robert
Woodson Sr., president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a
non-profit group working with low-income black communities. He said the key
is money for programs that reach into the community to help build character
and values.

"The reason young men engage in criminal behavior is not just for money, it
is to make a name for themselves, to have some expression of worth, even if
that expression is self-destructive," he said.

Woodson also said he believed blacks are not discriminated against by the
criminal-justice system. Rather, he said, there is a greater concentration
of police in black communities because the residents there insist on more
policing to deal with street crimes.

Looking at the prison population through the race lense is a flawed project,
agreed Robert Pambianco, chief policy counsel at the Washington Legal
Foundation, a conservative think tank.

"All this talk about race and statistics is a red herring thrown in by
people who want to return to the '60s," said Pambianco. "It is an attempt to
undermine efforts to keep violent offenders in prison."

The question, he said, is whether the individual committed the crime. And if
so, was race a factor in how the individual was convicted or sentenced?

And the answer, some criminologists say, is that often it is. Evidence of
prejudice in the criminal-justice system is overwhelming, they say.

First, criminologists such as William Chambliss, professor of sociology at
George Washington University and past president of the American Society of
Criminologists, point to law enforcement.

Police, he says, admit that they focus their resources on black communities,
particularly when enforcing drug laws and despite studies that show whites
consume more drugs than blacks. "It is much easier to go into a black
community and pop someone selling drugs on the street corner than to go into
a suburb where drug use happens behind closed doors," Levensen said.

Blacks are also more frequently viewed as suspects, pulled over and targeted
by raids, Chambliss said.

A survey of traffic stops in Volusia County, Fla., for instance, showed
nearly 70 percent of those stopped were black or Hispanic, according to
Georgetown University Law Professor David Cole, author of "No Equal
Justice."

"Police look for crimes in the ghetto, and that's where they find them,"
Chambliss said.

Criminologists say sentencing guidelines were imposed in part to rid the
criminal-justice system of sentences that varied dramatically because of
prejudicial factors such as race, gender, individual circumstance or
geography. But African Americans still received sentences an average of six
months longer than whites for committing the same crime, according to a 1998
University of Georgia study.

This report includes information from P-I staff.