Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.
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[On the Need for Comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform.]
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Washington Post columnist, Richard Cohen should be commended for his concern about the high incarceration rate of black men. But his understanding and diagnosis of the problem is off base. He repeats the mantras of the leading black public intellectuals and claims that “a kind of cultural malignancy has taken root in parts of the African American underclass.”
Let’s look at the actual violent crime data by race from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
What one sees here is that violent crime in black America is way down from where it was in the 1970s and 1980s. If one were to presume a simple and direct relationship between bad cultural values and crime—I don’t, but the pundits do—then one should be arguing that black America has much better cultural values today than in past decades. Also, one should note that the black violent crime rate is lower now than the white violent crime rate was in the 1970s. Did anyone declare that a “cultural malignancy” had taken root in white America during the 1970s? For anyone bothering to look at the data, there is no basis on which to claim that a “cultural malignancy has taken root” in black America.
Where people routinely “get it wrong” is by presuming that the incarceration rate is a simple reflection of the crime rate—it isn’t. America’s so-called tough on crime policies and war on drugs have dramatically increased the incarceration rate. We saw above that there has been no huge upward trend in violent crime since the 1970s. Below we can see the overall violent crime and property crime trends. Both show declines since the 1970s.
Now, look at the incarceration rate trend below.
It just keeps going up. So, although the crime rate for black males has decreased, the incarceration rate keeps increasing. If there is a “cultural malignancy” in American society it is our criminal justice system which has an insatiable appetite for black bodies. When, when, when will our so-called leaders bother to actually look at the data and speak out about this? When!?!
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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.
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