RACIAL DISPARITY OF INCARCERATION HURTS BLACK FAMILIES

With little protest from its crime-weary citizens, the United States has
become the prison camp of the western world, locking up 2 million of its
population.

Young black men are a disproportionate number of the inmates. Among men
between 20 and 34, 1.4 percent of white men and 4 percent of Hispanic men
are behind bars. But 12 percent of black men in that same age group are
incarcerated, according to the Justice Department.

That is a stunning statistic. No community can survive the effective loss of
so many of its young men.

And the 12 percent figure manages to minimize the crisis, since it is a
snapshot of the prison population over any given day. According to Allen
Beck, chief demographer for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 30
percent of black men will be incarcerated during their lives.

Yet you hear little outcry from civil rights advocates. Al Sharpton has
campaigned against slavery in Sudan. Jesse Jackson battles gender
segregation at Augusta National. Georgia civil rights activist Tyrone Brooks
protests the possible return of the Confederate battle flag to Georgia's
Capitol.

But the high rate of incarceration - which is decimating the black working
class - is not the central focus of civil rights advocates. How could that
be? It is the single most daunting challenge to black America today because
it creates the conditions that lead to other failures.

Already, nearly 70 percent of black children are born outside the bonds of
marriage - leaving those children more vulnerable to educational failure,
drug abuse and early parenthood themselves. A community is in trouble when
children born to two-parent families represent a minority.

But with so many men of marriageable age behind bars, there is little hope
for rebuilding the black family structure. Even when released from prison,
those men will make poor prospects for marriage. With criminal histories,
they will not easily find good jobs. Moreover, hard time in prison often
turns a bad criminal into a worse one - a man who will be disinclined to
rejoin society on any but the most destructive terms.

Clearly, there are among black prisoners many violent felons who deserve
their sentences. They are men who rob, murder, rape and maim, making war
zones of their neighborhoods. The presence of violent predators not only
endangers the lives of law-abiding citizens, but also ruins economic
prospects. Down-at-the-heels neighborhoods have a chance at rebirth only
when their streets are safe.

But America's criminal justice system does a poor job of separating the
hardened criminal from the minor offender with a shot at rehabilitation -
especially if the offenders are black. Research shows that black men are
more likely to be imprisoned for minor offenses, while white men are more
likely to be given probation for the same crimes.

This impulse to imprison black men now stretches to include the man-child.
Frightened by a few highly publicized juvenile crimes, politicians began
imposing harsher sanctions on juvenile offenders in the early 1990s.
Predictably, the lash has fallen more frequently on black and brown boys
than white.

Among young people who have never been to a juvenile prison, blacks are more
than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced by juvenile courts to
prison time, according to a 2000 report, "And Justice for Some," issued by
the Justice Department and several foundations. For those charged with drug
offenses, black youths are 48 times more likely than whites to be sentenced
to juvenile prisons, the report said.

It is now possible to visit black neighborhoods where most of the young men
have disappeared, where families spend their Sundays visiting their
incarcerated loved ones, where boys believe going to prison is a rite of
manhood. Those neighborhoods cannot hope to offer their residents a route
into the American mainstream.

The epidemic of incarceration ought to be the full-time preoccupation of
every civil rights group - indeed, every human rights group - in the
country. It represents a grave threat to the future of not only black
America but all of America.