By Malik Russell

As we have seen, the expansion of the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration began during a period of mass unrest, urban rebellion, and Black political challenges to the status-quo. The masses of disgruntled poor Blacks who might appear on the front lines of protests and demands for equality were gradually being steered into prisons at higher and higher numbers peaking during the 1990’s and pushing the number of imprisoned into the stratosphere.

Not only did mass incarceration suction off young and angry masses of Blacks off the street and into prisons, it coincides as Western and Wilde point out with the deindustrialization of the United States economy.

“The decline of manufacturing industry employment in the Midwest and the northeast coupled to the exodus of the middle class and working class blacks from inner cities produced pockets of severe unemployment in poor urban neighborhoods. From 1969 to 1979, central cities recorded enormous declines in manufacturing and blue collar employment. New York, for example, lost 170,000 blue collar jobs through the 1970s, another 120,000 jobs were shed in Chicago, and blue collar employment in Detroit fell by 90,000 jobs (Kasarda 1989, 29).”

This remains a key aspect of the ways in which the Black community has been destabilized and how expansion of the criminal justice and prison industrial complex have served as a shield disguising the true impact of the use of mechanisms of social control as well as the failure of society to provide sustainable employment for Black communities.

Accordingly, adds Western and Wildeman “For young men in metropolitan areas, employment rates fell by 30 percent among black high school dropouts and nearly 20 percent among black high school graduates. Job loss was only a third as large among young non-college whites (Bound and Holzer 1993, 390).”

Generally the numbers of unemployed in the Black community are often skewered to reflect a more positive but less accurate picture of the ways in members of the Black community are generally ostracized from economic opportunity.

“In measuring employment or wages, the predominantly low-skill and minority men locked up in prisons and jails are not included in the standard labor force,” writes Western in a previous article on Black economic progress. “Thus imprisonment effectively conceals economic inequality by excluding large numbers of poor men fro official accounts of the labor market.”

Western looks at the employment rate which measures the percentage of a population actually employed. In general the employment rate for Black people is always higher than for Whites and often double in regards to Black men compared to White men. When you include those imprisoned as part of the equation you getter a better since of the inequality. If we look at the rate of employment for Black high school dropouts in 1999, there was a 21 percentage point difference in true employment. When you look at the actual employment rate for all black men including those incarcerated it stood at 66.7% compared to the listed rate of 72.1% in 1999. When you look at high school dropouts age 22-30 the employment rate was listed at 50.9% while the true rate was 29.9% of Black men in that age group actually having a job.

One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars.

In a sense massive unemployment in the Black community has been addressed by criminalizing certain behaviors and incarcerating masses of young people who have subpar educational attainment, few marketable skills, and little to any access to meaningful work.

This process of utilizing prisons as the key means of social control for Black communities has numerous and related negative impacts on the community. For one it limits the number of available men able to marry and support families, secondly it limits the number of possible young radicals upset with the system necessary to create a critical mass, and thirdly it creates whole groups of mainly young men with no marketable skills, social stigma and no access to sustainable employment or the ability to become involved politically based on a felon conviction. When all the components are compared together it creates what is essentially a perpetual underclass population within the Black Community.
In addition to the continual destabilization of Black families economically through unemployment of young men and socially through high levels of imprisonment, this whole process of removing huge populations from key areas has additional consequences that fuel community instability and make them unsafe.

Ironically, one would assume that the high crime areas where a good majority of individuals are funneled into prisons from would become safer, but this does not tend to be the case. Todd Clear of John Jay College of Criminal Justice argues that “we find that low levels of incarceration seem to benefit a neighborhood’s public safety. But when incarceration reaches a certain level in an area that already struggles for assets, the effects of the imprisonment undermine the building blocks of social order.”

There are many neighborhoods in urban communities that supply large numbers of the prison population. Practically “million-dollar blocks” where states and counties spend millions of dollars to incarcerate individuals but relatively few dollars on the front end to provide services or employment. In a 2004 story in the Village Voice it noted that in Brooklyn, New York alone there were “35 blocks that fit this category—ones where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million.”

So, in many instances it is not a question of money being spent-the money is being spent, it’s more a question of priorities. There should and must be a political will to provide monies for employment and education as opposed to incarceration. Dealing with social inequality by writing off entire populations of communities destined for prison and perpetual second class citizenship, unless they are lucky enough to make it off the plantation holds dire consequences for those communities and the nation at large.

According to a policy brief “Ganging Up on Communities: Putting Gang Crime in Context” by the Justice Policy Institute, “The gangs are centralized in neighborhoods within the city, specifically those are struggling economically.”

They point to a study on Los Angeles published in the Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection and Critical Care that examined the relationship between gang-related homicides in the community based on eight socio-economic factors and the “strongest correlations with gang violence were employment and income.” They noted that “In communities where the unemployment rates were between 14%-16%, there were 15 times as many gang homicides as neighborhoods where the unemployment rate was 4% to 7%.

Having the option of employment has served as the keystone requirement in terms of socio-economic progress in this nation. It precludes higher education and even political access, because you can have both without the ability to secure employment and support a family. Without the ability to work and support a family what future can one surrounded by poverty aspire to? When we add in a major shift in the US economy away from manufacturing to a more service economy and the disappearance of those traditional sectors of employment for those without college degrees-we start to get an idea of the implications for the Black community and poor peoples as a whole. In previous times, ethnic groups tended to age out of gangs and matriculated into the manufacturing sector, married, and become stable. Black communities have not experienced this as an option.

We know historically that the prison industrial complex represents the intertwining mechanisms of social control that are designed to maintain the social order. This was the job it was created for and continually finds new ways to perform. If we are serious about addressing social issues within the Black community, we must begin to look at ways of dismantling a system of crime and punishment that justifies incarceration as the key and often final solution to addressing social inequities.

A journalist and regular contributor to the Black Press, Malik Russell is the former communications director with the Justice Policy Institute and communications coordinator for Critical Resistance’s 10th Anniversary Conference-CR10. The views expressed in this series are his and not necessarily those of any organization.

Via Voxunion

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