Time for a Serious Debate about Drug Legalization

With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals?

In response to this question from his online Town Hall, Obama's answer was a simple no. This answer may have been good for momentarily appeasing some on the political right, but it did not wrestle with the seriousness of the question.

The Huffington Post fleshed out the issue with a remark from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition:

Despite the president's flippant comments today, the grievous harms of marijuana prohibition are no laughing matter. Certainly, the 800,000 people arrested last year on marijuana charges find nothing funny about it, nor do the millions of Americans struggling in this sluggish economy. It would be an enormous economic stimulus if we stopped wasting so much money arresting and locking people up for nonviolent drug offenses and instead brought in new tax revenue from legal sales, just as we did when ended alcohol prohibition 75 years ago during the Great Depression.

From The Economist, March 7th, 2009:

In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to leaglise drugs.

"Least bad" does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

From Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, March 27th, 2009:

It's an indictment of our fact-averse political culture that a statement of the blindingly obvious could sound so revolutionary. "Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters on her plane Wednesday as she flew to Mexico for an official visit. "Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border . . . causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians."

. . .

First, though, let's be honest with ourselves. This whole disruptive, destabilizing enterprise has one purpose, which is to supply the U.S. market with illegal drugs. As long as the demand exists, entrepreneurs will find a way to meet it. The obvious demand-side solution -- legalization -- would do more harm than good with some drugs, but maybe not with others. We need to examine all options. It's time to put everything on the table, because all we've accomplished so far is to bring the terrible violence of the drug trade ever closer to home.

If we are lucky, some day we will conduct a serious analysis and debate about decriminalizing drugs.

More Than Just Bonuses

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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The outrage over the AIG bonuses runs the risk of missing the larger point of the increasing income inequality in America. The culture-of-poverty argument about the black poor also misses this development. Since the 1970s, the wealth created by the American economy has been increasingly concentrated among the richest Americans. We can see this shift by looking at the minimum wage and the wages for workers by decile.

In 1968, the minimum wage was $7.63 in 2005 dollars [PDF]. In 2005, it had declined by about a third to $5.15. The minimum wage serves as a floor for all low wages. When it moves up, it pushes up the wages of workers earning just above the minimum wage. When it declines, the reverse happens. These workers at the bottom of the wage distribution are disproportionately black.

In 1975, workers at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution earned 3.8 times [PDF] what workers at the 10th percentile did. By 2005, the ratio had increased to 4.5. A similar trend occurred with the ratio of the 90th percentile and the 50th percentile. That ratio went from 1.9 in 1975 to 2.3 in 2005. Again, the workers in the lower half of the wage distribution are disproportionately black.

When the poverty punditry talks about black poverty without paying any attention to economics, they are "getting it wrong." The increasing income inequality that America has experienced since the 1970s is one reason why the black poverty rate is so high.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Another Black Public Intellectual Gets It Wrong

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.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________

[Stanford University law professor, Richard Thompson Ford, whose bio states that he is a regular contributor to Slate, came to my attention because of his review of William Julius Wilson's new book More Than Just Race in the New York Times Book Review. In Ford's review, he makes all of the "classic" mistakes that I identify in Getting It Wrong. The following is an open letter to him.]


Dear Professor Ford:

The second sentence of your New York Times book review of William Julius Wilson's More Than Just Race states: "The poverty, violence and hopelessness in America’s inner cities have become increasingly dire in the four decades since the height of the civil rights movement." This statement is not correct.

The Census Bureau reports that in 1966 the black poverty rate was 41.8 percent. In 2007, it was 24.5 percent, 17.3 percentage points lower than in 1966. The Center for Disease Control's Health, United States, 2008 reports that in 1970 the age-adjusted homicide rate for black men was 78.2 for every 100,000 men. In 2005, it was 37.3 per 100,000. For black females, the 1970 homicide rate was 14.7 and 6.1 in 2005. Many of the leading black public intellectuals are nostalgic for the past, but this is only because they do not accurately remember how rough the 1960s and 1970s were.

Just about every leading black public intellectual who discusses the black poor recently gets these and other basic facts wrong. The consensus among these black elites is that there is an epidemic of bad behavior among lower-income blacks that has led to a big increase in black poverty. Juan Williams states, "too many poor and low-income black people are not taking advantage of opportunities to get themselves out of poverty." Cynthia Tucker claims, "drug use, poor classroom performance and the embrace of outlaw culture have done nothing but cement the black underclass at the bottom of American society." Henry Louis Gates argues that America now has "the largest [black] underclass in our history" and "it’s time to concede that, yes, there is a culture of poverty." You see that your second sentence fits with this theme.

Apparently, none of these commentators took much time to examine the black poverty trends. Over the 1990s, when lower-income blacks were supposedly mired in a culture of poverty, they experienced the largest reduction in black poverty since the 1960s. In 1992, the black poverty rate was 33.4 percent. By 2000, it had reached its lowest level on record, 22.5 percent. The culture-of-poverty idea or the "tangle of pathology" as William Julius Wilson has called it does not help us understand this historic decline in black poverty.

It is my hypothesis that Wilson's work (as well as the work of others over the 1980s and early 1990s) is a major factor in why black public intellectuals keep getting the facts wrong about black America. Wilson's underclass theory shifted the analysis of poverty away from an economic theory of poverty to a cultural theory of poverty. People spend less time looking at economic data and more time looking for "evidence" of bad black behavior which, according to underclass theory, has been on the rise since the 1960s. Gates reported that America has "the largest [black] underclass in our history" in the middle of the historic 1990s decline in black poverty.

Please be aware that I am not just playing a silly game of gotcha. Blacks are much more likely to be poor than whites. But if we wish to reduce black poverty, we absolutely have to understand the 1990s decline. The only way we can have further reductions in black poverty is to know what works. The immensely popular culture-of-poverty idea does not.

You are based at Stanford University. I would like to direct your attention to a short article in Pathways magazine. Pathways is a publication of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. The Winter 2009 issue has a short article discussing research on the change in child poverty over the 1990s in 12 advanced countries including the United States. The Pathways piece concludes: "Much headway against child poverty can be made by combining full employment policy with aggressive income transfers." These are important findings that one sees over and over again in the economic analysis of poverty. Unfortunately, this knowledge seems to have been lost among the leading black public intellectuals in their culture-of-poverty haze. If we wish to reduce black poverty, we need to return to an economic analysis of poverty and heed its lessons.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Less Crime, Lower Costs: The Smart-on-Crime Approach

We can have lower crime rates, a less expensive criminal justice system, and more humane criminal justice policies. This was the message of a summit convened by Representative Robert Scott of Virginia on March 3rd. Representative Scott brought together a panel of researchers, advocates and criminal justice professionals to highlight smart-on-crime approaches to crime prevention, sentencing and ex-offender reentry. Representatives Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan were also present to show their support for smart-on-crime approaches.

The U.S. criminal justice system is without a doubt the least effective and most expensive criminal justice system among advanced countries. Our incarceration rate is about seven times the rate of other advanced countries. One might think that with this extraordinarily high incarceration rate we would have a relatively low crime rate. This is not the case. We have a slightly above average overall crime rate among advanced nations. In other words, most of the Western developed world has policies that produce both less crime and less incarceration than in the United States. Our tough-on-crime approach has succeeded in providing us with the worst possible outcomes. Although the tough-on-crime approach has failed us for more than three decades, we continue to think that if we become even tougher on crime we will somehow produce different results.

The panelists assembled by Representative Scott showed clearly that there is a better way: smart-on-crime. What smart-on-crime means is that, as a first step, we need to increase our use of scientifically-proven programs that prevent individuals from ever beginning involvement in crime. If we prevent people from ever committing crime, there are fewer crime victims, lower criminal justice costs and more people working instead of languishing in prisons. A society with fewer criminals—not more inmates—is the absolute best for everyone.

Brian Bumbarger of the Prevention Research Center at Penn State University presented the audience with a menu [PDF] of rigorously-evaluated programs that prevent youth from engaging in criminal activity. Big Brothers/Big Sisters reduces youths’ likelihood of becoming involved in crime and increases student test scores. For a societal standpoint, when the criminal-justice savings are factored in, any investment in Big Brothers/Big Sisters ultimately pays for itself. The Nurse-Family Partnership program targets at-risk pregnant mothers for prenatal health care and for personal-development and parenting-skills training. This program reduces the likelihood of substance abuse and child abuse by the mother and dramatically improves child outcomes. For every dollar invested in this program, the societal financial benefit is over $3. It was mentioned at the summit that many youth in foster care end up in prison. But when foster care is paired with effective treatment programs through Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care the likelihood of a child in foster care becoming involved in crime is significantly reduced. For every dollar spent on this program, the societal benefit is more than $11. These are just a few of the options we have if we ever decide that we are serious about reducing crime and saving money.

The better an ex-offender reintegrates into mainstream society, the more likely the person is to give up on criminal activities permanently. Unfortunately, as part of our tough-on-crime mentality, we continue to devise ways to prevent the formerly incarcerated from living normal lives. Even after an individual has done the time for a particular crime, we find ways to punish them over and over again. At the summit, Margaret Love of the American Bar Association reported on an over-200-page report [PDF] which documents all of the federal laws and regulations that limit the access of people who have paid their debt to society to housing, voting, employment and social benefits. These tough-on-crime policies ultimately work to increase crime by preventing the reintegration of the formerly incarcerated.

One of the most important things to keep someone who was incarcerated from re-offending is a job. The Eastern District of Missouri has redefined the role of probation officers as Doug Burris, the chief probation officer, reported. In that district, the probation officers actively assist the formerly incarcerated in finding work. The officers have been highly successful at finding ex-offenders work and keeping them from re-offending. An evaluation of the Eastern District's program found that while the recidivism rate was 68 percent nationally, it was only 15 percent in the Eastern District. Jobs fight crime.

Representative Scott has done the country a service by highlighting the work of many people who are developing smart-on-crime strategies. These strategies will make our communities safer and save us money—if we ever manage to wean ourselves off of the failed tough-on-crime approach.

Do We Need to Talk about Race?

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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________________________________________________________________________


Attorney General Eric Holder makes a number of interesting points in his remarks on Black History Month. Ultimately, though, I am always sour on the idea of conversations on race. The call to "have a conversation about race" is really a call to discuss why is there racial inequality in America. For Holder, it is specifically a question about black social and economic disadvantage.

I'm not convinced that many Americans know enough of the facts around black inequality to have a useful discussion. I've been pointing out, for example, that few of the leading black public intellectuals even know the basic facts about black poverty. For example, in his recent book, Juan Williams states, “too many poor and low-income black people are not taking advantage of opportunities to get themselves out of poverty,” in complete ignorance of the historic decline in black poverty over the 1990s. I think that most of the discussions that Williams' work has engendered has been harmful to black people.

I much prefer Holder's call for Americans to study black history. I would add that we also need to study the black present. If we could have discussions within and after some serious study of the issues that would be better.

Holder's remarks were greeted with hostility by many. This development is not completely surprising. The racial "conversations" in the online commentary to articles on racial inequality that I have noticed have often been hostile and at times blatantly racist. This fact reveals another problem with the "talk about race" idea.

People assume that if people talk honestly about racial inequality they will be able to come to a shared understanding and a happy compromise about the issues. They do not imagine a situation where everyone becomes more narrow-minded and hateful. But this alternative is certainly a possibility.

DuBois once phrased the question of black disadvantage as "How does it feel to be a problem?" pointing out how that question can be hurtful and inspire defensiveness. And the reversal of the question is "How does it feel to be an oppressor?" This question does not put whites at ease either. There is a reason people are avoiding the discussions Holder is calling for. These discussions can go wrong easily.

A better approach would be to try to have discussions about solutions to the causes of black inequality. For example, Holder mentions that racial relations have changed since the Brown decision. He should have also mentioned that our schools, however, are still separate and unequal. I wish that he had called for not an open discussion on "race" but for a discussion about what can be done to make our schools more integrated and equal. Even this discussion could go bad quickly, but I think the odds of it being productive are higher than a random open discussion.

We do need to have discussions on racial inequality to end racial inequality, but it is a minefield. People engaging in these discussions need to educate themselves and proceed with empathy and caution.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Hardships of the African-American Unemployed

Read about the hardships of the African-American unemployed.

Conservative Leaders Still Reject Reality

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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________________________________________________________________________

[A senior advisor to president George W. Bush] said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Ron Suskind, 2004

"By almost every measure available . . . this recession is steeper than any in the last 40 years, including the harsh recession of the early 1980s," states Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, an organization that I also work for. By every measure except for the way conservative members of Congress have been behaving. They have played petty politics in holding up the economic recovery package while the rate of job losses has increased to about a half a million a month. Everyone seems to realize that we needed urgent action--a month ago--but them.

The global economic meltdown basically started in the United States, but the United States has lagged in implementing an economic stimulus package. The Center for American Progress reports that Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia and South Korea have all passed stimulus packages ahead of the United States.

Conservative leaders are big on tax cuts, but the record of tax cuts in stimulating the economy is poor. The Bush administration cut taxes and yet the Bush years had the worst record for economic growth since World War II. Even the conservative economist and former Ronald Reagan advisor, Martin Feldstein, acknowledges that tax cuts are very weak when it comes to stimulating the economy. He states, "Experience shows that the money from such temporary, lump-sum tax cuts is largely saved or used to pay down debt. Only about 15 percent of last year's tax rebates led to additional spending." He adds, "The proposed business tax cuts are also likely to do little to increase business investment and employment." For those of us in the "reality-based community," pushing for more tax cuts in the recovery package and less spending, makes the package worse not better.

Conservative leaders do not seem to get that the point of a stimulus package is too spend money to jumpstart the economy. John McCain recently condemned the recovery package by saying, “This is not a stimulus bill; it is a spending bill.” Consumers are cutting back spending and businesses are cutting back spending causing the economy to tank. The point of a stimulus package is for the government to step in and increase spending rapidly in the hopes ending the downward economic spiral. Conservative leaders think that by limiting the amount of spending in the stimulus package they are somehow being fiscally responsible. How is prolonging and deepening an already severe recession fiscally responsible?

Judging from the statements of Rush Limbaugh, we cannot be certain that conservative leaders even know that we are facing a severe economic crisis. Last month, Limbaugh wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

There's a serious debate in this country as to how best to end the recession. The average recession will last five to 11 months; the average recovery will last six years. Recessions will end on their own if they're left alone. What can make the recession worse is the wrong kind of government intervention.

The current recession began in December of 2007, 13 months ago. In January, the U.S. economy lost nearly 600,000 jobs. This month was the worst so far for job losses. We have lost 3.6 million jobs in total and the recession is not likely to end any time soon, so why is Limbaugh even discussing recessions that last 11 months or less?

There are now 2.2 million blacks unemployed. Without an effective stimulus we could add another million blacks to the ranks of the unemployed before the economy begins to recover. Someone, somehow needs to get conservative leaders back into the "reality-based community" or else they will continue to make matters worse.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

America's Schools: Still Separate, Still Unequal

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.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________

What the hell good is Brown V. Board of Education if nobody wants it?
--Bill Cosby, Address at the NAACP' on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education

Fifty-five years after the Brown decision, blacks and Latinos in American schools are more segregated than they have been in more than four decades.

Schools remain highly unequal, sometimes in terms of dollars and very frequently in terms of teachers, curriculum, peer groups, connections with colleges and jobs, and other key aspects of schooling.
--Gary Orfield, Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society

One regularly hears people speak as if we have in fact achieved the goals of the Brown decision. We have not.

America's schools remain stubbornly segregated and unequal as Gary Orfield documents in Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge. By the standard of integrated and equal education, we have been moving backward, further away from the Promised Land of racial equality.

Given the miraculous success of Barack Obama winning the presidency, some people believe that America has finally overcome racial discrimination. But Obama's achievement is only the removal of one obstacle on the path to equality. There are still many more, including institutionalized inferior education.

Obtaining equal and integrated education for black students may be the most difficult challenge in the struggle for black civil rights. Equal educational opportunity was one of the first goals of the Civil Rights Movement. Many believed that the Brown decision would cause America to provide integrated and equal education for blacks. This did not happen. The majority of black students remain in segregated and unequal schools.

The figure below shows that nearly three quarters of black students attend majority nonwhite schools. Thirty-nine percent attend schools that are 90 or more percent nonwhite.
Source:Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge, p. 26.

Majority nonwhite schools tend to be of lower quality than majority white schools. For example, an analysis of teacher quality from Illinois below shows that even with recent improvements, majority nonwhite schools had much lower teacher quality (ITAC) ratings than majority white schools. The solid black line is the average score for majority white schools. The other lines indicate increasing percentages of nonwhite students as one moves further below the line for majority-white schools. Today, as in the past, the best American schools go to white students, the worst to black students.

Source:Leveling Up: Narrowing the Teacher Academic Capital Gap in Illinois [PDF]



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Improving Obama's stimulus plan

Current economic conditions call for massive federal investment in the economy. Thankfully, President Obama is aware of this fact. But there is some debate as to whether his plan will make a big enough dent in the expected job losses.

What else could Obama do to stimulate the economy? What projects could he add to increase the size of the plan? See some ideas here.

Back to the 1980s? Let’s Hope Not.

The December unemployment rate for the nation as a whole was 7.2 percent. This rate is a 16-year high. Rightly, many people view this level of unemployment as a national emergency. In December the black unemployment rate was 11.9 percent. If 7.2 percent is an emergency, what should we call 11.9 percent?

Since 1972, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the black unemployment rate, only once has the black unemployment rate been lower than 7.2 percent—only once in almost 40 years. In March of 2000 the black unemployment rate was 7 percent, the lowest level on record, and still in emergency territory by my measure. In the great economic year of 2000, the economic condition of black America was still critical by national standards.

The good economy days of 2000 are long gone. Without an effective federal stimulus, the Economic Policy Institute, an organization I work for, forecasts that by next year the national unemployment rate will reach 10.2 percent and the black unemployment rate 18.2 percent. For black teens, the projected unemployment rate is 55.7 percent.

The last time blacks faced such a dire jobs crisis was in the early 1980s when the country experienced back-to-back recessions in 1980 and 1981. The black poverty rate spiked upwards. The crack cocaine economy and its attendant deaths and disorder spread through black communities. By the end of the 1980s, teen pregnancies increased. Black educational progress stalled.

Will an 18.2 percent black unemployment rate produce similar results in the 2010s? Let’s not try to find out.

President-elect Obama’s economic recovery plan so far looks good, and it just might keep us from returning to the unemployment rates of the early 1980s. Even if we were not in the middle of a deep recession, we would need many of the investments he is calling for to strengthen the U.S. economy. In a sense, it is great that the recession might force us to make many of the infrastructure and other investments that we have been putting off.

Although some people are shocked at the price tag of the economic recovery plan, the real worry from my standpoint is whether the plan is big enough. According to the projections [PDF] from Obama’s economic advisors, with the stimulus, the national unemployment rate will be about 8 percent in 2009. That level of unemployment would translate to about a 14 percent black unemployment rate. That rate of unemployment still paints an ugly economic picture for black America.

Further, the projections from Obama’s advisors might be too optimistic. Without the stimulus, they see the national unemployment rate peaking at 9 percent. My organization and others expect the peak without stimulus to be higher. If the Obama estimate is too low, even with the stimulus we could experience a black unemployment rate above 14 percent.

In the best economic times, black America needs a recovery and reinvestment plan. Faced with one of the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression, blacks desperately need it.

How Successful Are Black Immigrants?

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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________________________________________________________________________


Proponents of "model minority" stories about black immigrants always fail to compare black immigrants to white immigrants and to U.S.-born whites. When this comparison is done the picture changes dramatically. Two recent reports allow us to make these comparisons.

In the Fiscal Policy Institute's report Working for a Better Life, the researchers provide the wages of U.S.-born and foreign-born workers in New York City by race (p. 32). The figure below shows that among workers with a high school degree foreign-born whites earn significantly more an hour ($14.28) than foreign-born blacks ($12.39). Among workers with a college degree, both groups earn about the same amount. Whether high-school or college educated, U.S.-born whites earn significantly more than white and black foreign-born workers.

The Integration of Immigrants and Their Families in Maryland by the Urban Institute allows us to compare the occupational success of immigrants from Europe and Africa in Maryland (p. 36). Immigrants from both Europe and Africa can be of any race, but African immigrants will likely be disproportionately black and European immigrants likely disproportionately white.

The figure below shows that European immigrants with non-U.S. college degrees are much more successful than similarly educated African immigrants at finding skilled work. Among immigrants in the United States for 10 years of less, 41 percent of Africans with non-U.S. college degrees were doing unskilled work. Only 12 percent of similar Europeans were in these occupations.

These analyses are fairly simple. More complex multivariate analyses could change the picture. The story one gets from looking at employment rates, family income and other economic indicators also could be quite different.

Nonetheless, in the comparisons discussed above, black immigrants seem far from a "model minority." In New York City, white immigrants appear to earn slightly more than black immigrants among similarly educated immigrants. In Maryland, it seems that college-educated white immigrants obtain better jobs than college-educated black immigrants. Once again it looks like American society might not be race-blind after all.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Crime and College: A Second Look at the Numbers

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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________________________________________________________________________

Is the Black Teen Murder Rate Increasing?

I agree with James Alan Fox that we should be spending more on preventing crime in black communities and that we need to find ways to keep illegal guns off the streets. But Steven Levitt makes a convincing argument that Fox is exaggerating the increase in the number of homicides by black teens. Fox is mainly capturing the fact that their are more black teens today than seven years ago. There has been only a very slight increase in the homicide rate for black teens. Will the homicide rate increase as the economy worsens? Sadly, I think that it will. Let's hope that I'm wrong.

Has the Growth in Higher Education Stalled for Hispanics and Blacks?

The American Council on Education claims that this is the case but I'm not convinced. See the piece below. I do think that we need to work to increase the rates of Hispanics and blacks obtaining college degrees, regardless.

35 Years Old and Still in School

For many Americans, their formal schooling years do not end in their twenties. The failure to recognize this fact was the source of an error made in a new report by the American Council on Education (ACE). In a press release and newsletter, ACE incorrectly claims that younger adults are obtaining less post-secondary education than their parents. The report compares 25 to 29 year olds to adults 30 and older and finds that for some racial groups, the older adults have a higher percentage of college degrees. The supposed decline was observed for Hispanic Americans and American Indians. African Americans showed no difference between older and younger adults. For whites and Asian Americans, the younger group had a higher share of college degrees.

The full report Minorities in Higher Education 2008 contradicts the claim of declining educational attainment. ACE finds that college enrollment among African Americans rose by 46 percent between 1995 and 2005. For Hispanics it was even higher, up 66 percent. These increases suggest that black and Latino young adults today should have more college education than in the past, not less. This is in fact the case.

The best way to assess the trend in post-secondary education is to compare 25 to 29 years olds year-to-year. By comparing different age groups, ACE creates an apples-to-oranges comparison. If there was a decline in minority youth seeking higher education, an analysis of individuals in the same age group would reveal it.

The tables below show that for Hispanics and blacks there has been an increase in the percent of 25-to-29 year olds with an associate's degree or higher from 2000 to 2007. We see no signs of a stalling when we restrict the analysis to individuals of the same age. It is also worth noting that for 2000 and 2007, the highest rate of college degree attainment is not 25-to-29 year olds. This is the first problem with comparing 25-to-29 year olds to older adults.




The second problem is that the growth in college degrees by age category from 2000 to 2007 is not largest for the 25-to-29 year olds. For Hispanics, the biggest growth in college degrees is among the 50+--4 percentage points. For blacks, it is among the 35-to-39 year olds--7 percentage points. Simply, what we are seeing is not a decline in degrees earned by 25-to-29 year olds, but large increases for minority adults 30 years old and above.

Since the 1980s, about one-in-four students enrolled in America’s colleges and universities have been 30 years old or over. It would be nice to think that all of these older students were in school simply for the love of learning, but it is more likely that they were trying to find a way to increase their earnings.

In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Americans without a college degree could find a job that paid a good wage. Additionally, over these decades, the wages of these jobs increased significantly. Once one had a good job, there was no need to obtain more education as a means to higher earnings.

Since the 1970s, good jobs for those without a college degree have been harder and harder to find. The danger of being stuck in low-wage occupations is acute for Hispanics, blacks and American Indians. As a result, many Americans return to school as a step in trying to improve their financial situation. Many people need to find a new job requiring a higher educational credential to experience any significant increase in income. Low wage growth is ultimately the likely reason why Americans in their 30s are better educated than Americans in their 20s.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

NYTimes: A Plea for Sensible Gun Regulation

From the New York Times, December 23, 2008:

"For years, the gun lobby has defeated new gun control laws partly by arguing that stronger laws do not deter crime. A study prepared by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a bipartisan group headed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston, should finally put that myth to rest.

"The study analyzed trace data for guns used in connection with crimes during 2007. The data reveal a strong correlation between weak state gun laws and higher rates of in-state murders, police slayings and sales of guns used in crimes in other states."

Read the full editorial.

How Black Public Intellectuals Are Failing Black Students

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.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________


For the past 20 years or so, the leading black public intellectuals have used their command of the national media to condemn black students for supposedly not valuing education. For example, the NPR and Fox News correspondent, Juan Williams’ recent book claims that there is a “culture of failure” among black students.

There are two tragedies here. First, black students are being falsely condemned. The attitudinal data, the test-score trends and the college enrollment trends all show black students to value education at least as much—if not more than—white students. The second tragedy is that all of the energy the black public intellectuals have expended beating up on black students has not been used to help black students cope with the many educational disadvantages that they face.

Generally, black students do worse in school than white students because they are raised in families and communities that are socioeconomically disadvantaged relative to white students. Additionally, these disadvantaged students are then sent to schools that are of lower quality than the schools white students attend.

Thankfully, there are educational leaders and policy makers who don’t bother to listen to the misinformation about black students. Maryland, for example, has recognized that teacher quality matters and has made investments in recent years with the goal of improving teacher quality. There appears to have been a big payoff to black students. For example, in 2004, 53.2 percent of black six-graders were proficient on the state reading test. By 2008, the proficiency rate had increased to 72.4 percent. In math, the 2004 proficiency rate was 30.2 percent. By 2008, it had increased to 61.2 percent. These are very large gains in a short period of time.

I have not seen a very careful analysis of the data, so it is possible that factors other than the increased spending on teachers may have led to these increases. The academic research, however, generally does show a strong positive relationship between teacher quality and student achievement.

Although, black students have posted big test-score gains in a short period of time in Maryland, they are still the lowest scoring student group. It appears that all students have benefited from better teaching. Blacks were the lowest scoring racial group in 2004, and all groups increased their test scores—not just blacks. The reforms were statewide; they were not targeted to black students. Because all groups advanced, black students were not able to close the achievement gaps. Even with better schools, black students still come from families and communities that are disadvantaged.

People like Juan Williams should be drawing attention to the very impressive increases in test scores among black students in Maryland. They should be using their media power to move the other 49 states and the District of Columbia to improve teacher quality for black students in those states. Additionally, Williams should be pointing out that not only do black students need better schools, they also need other programs to reduce the socioeconomic disparities between black and white families and communities.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

How to Combat Housing Segregation; What the Auto Bailout Means for Blacks

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.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
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________________________________________________________________________

Combat Housing Segregation and Support Diversity

by Margery Austin Turner

"Research strongly suggests that Americans want more residential integration than we are getting. But a self-perpetuating combination of inequities, fears, and inertia work against this goal. Given the complexity of the factors sustaining residential segregation in urban America today, the federal government should take the lead on a three-pronged strategy: (1) enforcement to combat persistent discrimination, (2) education on the availability and desirability of diverse neighborhoods, and (3) incentives to encourage and nurture residential diversity. Each is essential to achieving the full potential of the other two."

[Read the full statement]

African Americans are especially at risk in the auto crisis

by Robert E. Scott and Christian Dorsey

"African Americans earn much higher wages in auto industry jobs than in other parts of the economy, and the loss of these solid, middle-class jobs would be a devastating blow. Hourly wages for African Americans in the motor vehicle industry averaged $17.08 (excluding fringe benefits) in 2007, versus economy-wide average wages for African American of $15.44 per hour."

[Read the full article]

William Raspberry Gets It Wrong

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.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
________________________________________________________________________


Sadly, William Raspberry has to be added to the too-long list of leading black public intellectuals who have their facts wrong about black America. In November, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Raspberry in which he argued, "Many black children -- and too many of their parents -- don't value education" and "Black communities are beset by crime and violence but, again, less because of racism than because of lack of discipline in those communities." Raspberry is wrong on both counts.

First, black students and their parents value education at least as much as white students, if not more than white students. I've been trying to get the punditry and the media to look at the actual data for a few years now. For example, in a recent lecture that I gave to the Education Policy Forum in Washington D.C., I pointed out that data from the Monitoring the Future survey, the National Educational Longitudinal Study, the Survey of Income Program Participation, Public Agenda's Reality Check survey and a number of other surveys all show black students to value education at least as much as white students. Most of these surveys, in fact, show black students to have stronger pro-school attitudes than white students.

The test-score trends also support this view. Although black students still have significantly lower test scores than white students, the gap has declined since the 1970s. The long-term trends National Assessment of Educational Progress, the General Social Survey vocabulary test, National Assessment of Adult Literacy and a variety of cognitive tests all show that black students standardized test scores have increased at a rate faster than white students over the last 40 years. If black students were rejecting education as much as Raspberry and others believe, it is not likely that this closing of the gap would have occurred.

Finally, black students have had strong growth in their enrollment and completion of college. Years ago, in the book, The Black-White Test-Score Gap, Christopher Jencks showed that when black and white students have equal levels of academic achievement in high school, black students are more likely to graduate from college. This result is what one would expect if black students valued education more than white students--which is exactly what the attitudinal survey data suggests.

Where this generation of black punditry goes wrong is that they fail to appreciate the degree of socioeconomic disadvantage the average black student faces relative to the average white student. A large black-white achievement gap already exists by first grade. This is because relative to white students, black students are much more likely to grow up in poverty, live in families with much less wealth (as opposed to income), have less-educated parents, have been born with a low birth weight, have a mother who is suffering from depression, and I could go on and on. These and other factors put black children behind from the earliest days of formal schooling. And then, to add insult to injury, we put these disadvantaged students in schools that are of significantly lower quality than the schools white students attend. This school-quality disadvantage increases the black-white achievement gap. And then to add further insult to injury, a generation of black public intellectuals decide it is black students who need to be condemned in this picture.

Raspberry is also wrong in his take on crime in black communities. Raspberry assumes that crime in black communities has been increasing because of a lack of discipline due to absent fathers. There may be lots of real and fictional crime stories in the media, but the facts are that from 1993 to 2004 we saw a strong and steady decline in violent crime in black communities. The data is also fairly strong that, again, black socioeconomic disadvantage lies at the root of the higher crime rates in black communities. See the list of references below for some recent research on this issue.

Raspberry's larger point was that we need to begin to shift our energies away from a focus on civil rights concerns like equal quality education and criminal justice reform to the issue of moral uplift in the black community. If one looks clearly at the evidence, it is clear that he is wrong on that point too.

Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Crime: References

• Eric D. Gould, Bruce A. Weinberg and David B. Mustard, “Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the United States, 1979-1997,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 84(1), February 2002: 45-61.


• Jeff Grogger, “Market Wages and Youth Crime,” Journal of Labor Economics 16(4), October 1998: 756-791.


• Morgan Kelly, “Inequality and Crime,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 82(4), November 2000: 530-539.


• Jens Ludwig, Greg Duncan and Paul Hirshfield, “Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 116(2), May 2001: 655-679.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Does Obama's Success Mean Blacks Have Overcome?

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.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
________________________________________________________________________


It has been wonderful to see people of all races celebrate the victory of Barack Obama. His advance does represent an important step forward for African Americans. But those who take his victory to mean that blacks have overcome are seeing the world through very rose colored glasses.

Obama's victory comes on the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report on the riots of the 1960s. That report can be used to assess how far blacks in general have come as opposed to how much one black elected official has achieved. In 1968, the Kerner Commission identified the criminal justice system, employment, housing and education as areas of significant black-white disparities that needed good public policy and large public investments to move us to an equal and integrated society. Sadly, many of the disparities the Commission highlighted 40 years ago remain with us today.

There may be less of the day-to-day police brutality that led to riots in several cities in the 1960s, but relations between blacks and the police are still not good. The cases of Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo and others still cause many blacks to fear the police rather than see the police as a force promoting safety and security. Further, many also see our criminal justice system as a profoundly anti-black institution. For example, The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently published an investigative report showing that for similar drug offenses blacks in Cleveland were more likely to be incarcerated than whites. Even in some cases where whites possessed more drugs and had more serious criminal records they received more leniency than blacks. There is much more that needs to be done in the area of criminal justice before we can say that blacks have overcome.

In 1968, blacks were about twice as likely to be unemployed as whites. In 2008, blacks are about twice as likely to be unemployed as whites. The crisis joblessness in black communities remains severe. Improving the educational outcomes of blacks will help in this area, but there remains significant anti-black attitudes in the labor market. My current research shows that while college-educated blacks have similar employment rates as whites, as one moves down the educational ladder the racial disparities grow rapidly. The black-white disparities are most severe for male high school dropouts. For some reason, employers see white male high school dropouts as much more desirable employees than black male high school dropouts. In a color-blind world, one high school dropout would be as good or as bad as the next, but we don't live in that world yet. In the American labor market, it helps to be white especially if one is less-educated.

Our schools and neighborhoods were largely separate and unequal in 1968, and they are still separate and unequal today. Barack Obama served Illinois as a senator. The Illinois Education Research Council has done important work on race and teacher quality [PDF, p. 24] in that state. The Council ranked all high schools by teacher quality using 2002 data. It found that nearly half of all black high school students were in the schools in the bottom 25 percent of the teacher-quality rankings. Only about one-sixth of white students were in these low teacher-quality schools. We can't say that we have overcome when blacks students are still segregated into the worse schools in America.

We have not overcome, but it is important to also acknowledge the progress that blacks have made. We know that blacks are not as educated as we would like them to be, but we should also acknowledge that the black population is more educated than it has ever been. In 2006, the year of the most recent data from the Digest of Education Statistics, 9.6 percent of the bachelor's degrees given nationally went to blacks. This rate was up from 7.9 percent in 1996, and it was the highest level on record. There is a substantial number of blacks in the American middle and upper class, and a large number of black elected officials. These are some of the positive developments that we have seen since the Kerner Commission report.

Obama's victory represents a significant advance for America on its path to racial equality. But we aren't there yet. The Kerner Commission report reminds us that while we have made great strides, there is still a long way to go. As Miriam Makeka sang in Portuguese--"a luta continua"--the struggle continues.


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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Obama the Non-Racial Centrist

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.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
________________________________________________________________________


"But even if Obama were not faced with towering crises that have nothing to do with race, ethnicity and special interest demands, he still would hew tightly to a moderate centrist path in his staff and cabinet picks. The tipoff of that was his campaign. There was, and could not have been, the slightest racial or confrontational edge to it. That was absolutely crucial to win over doubting centrist, and conservative independents. In the early stages of the campaign they leaned tenuously to McCain. But Obama's pitch that he'd put priority emphasis on tax and economic aid to the middle-class proved decisive in tipping the vote scale in his favor.

"This was no accident. Though Obama publicly distanced himself from Bill Clinton's conservative Democratic Leadership Council. He still hewed closely to the template that Clinton and the DLC laid out for Democrats to win elections.

"That is talk of strong defense, the war against terrorism, a vague plan for winding down the Iraq War, tax reform, a tame plan for affordable health care and the sub-prime lending crisis, and the economic resuscitation of mid-America. This non-racial, centrist pitch does not threaten or alienate the white middle-class. Meanwhile, Obama was virtually silent on issues such as racial profiling, affirmative action, housing and job discrimination, the racial disparities in prison sentencing, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, failing inner city schools, ending the racially-marred drug sentencing policy, and his Supreme Court appointments."

Read the full op-ed.

Why is the Black Male Employment Rate So Low?

THE WORK THAT REMAINS
A Forty-Year Update of the Kerner Commission Report

Forty years ago, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, famously concluded that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Its recommendations to promote racial integration and remedy the economic failures that fostered a wave of inner city violence were ultimately rejected by President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission. Today, minorities still face many of the troubling conditions outlined in the commission report, including under-representation in the labor market, high rates of poverty, disparities in education funding and disproportionate involvement in the criminal justice system.

In collaboration with the Eisenhower Foundation, EPI will present a forum to assess our nation's progress over the last forty years and, more important, to discuss what is still left to do to move us closer to an equal and high-performing society.

When and where
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Registration: 9:15 am
Program: 9:30 - 11:30 am
Economic Policy Institute
1333 H Street, NW, East Tower, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20005
[ RSVP below ]

Introduction
CHRISTIAN DORSEY
Outreach Coordinator, Economic Policy Institute

Opening remarks
DR. VALERIE RAWLSTON WILSON
Senior Resident Scholar, National Urban League Policy Institute
DR. ALAN CURTIS
President and CEO, Eisenhower Foundation
DR. JOHN IRONS
Research and Policy Director, Economic Policy Institute
DR. ALGERNON AUSTIN
Director of Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, Economic Policy Institute

Discussant
HILARY O. SHELTON
Director, NAACP-Washington Bureau
RSVP: Click here to reserve your seat now
________________________________________________________________________


Among America’s major racial and ethnic groups, blacks suffer most severely from a lack of jobs. As indicated in Figure A, from 1997 to 2007, blacks consistently had significantly lower employment rates when compared with whites. In 1997, the white-black differential in employment rates was 6.5 percentage points. By 2000, as a result of job growth in the second half of the 1990s, the gap had fallen to 4.1 percentage points. The 2001 recession and subsequent “jobless recovery” reversed these gains, and by 2004, the white-black employment rate gap had increased to 5.9 percentage points. Since 2004, the gap had been declining again, but the current economic downturn will likely reverse these gains.

[Read more.]

Short Takes: Criminal Justice

THE WORK THAT REMAINS
A Forty-Year Update of the Kerner Commission Report

Forty years ago, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, famously concluded that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Its recommendations to promote racial integration and remedy the economic failures that fostered a wave of inner city violence were ultimately rejected by President Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the commission. Today, minorities still face many of the troubling conditions outlined in the commission report, including under-representation in the labor market, high rates of poverty, disparities in education funding and disproportionate involvement in the criminal justice system.

In collaboration with the Eisenhower Foundation, EPI will present a forum to assess our nation's progress over the last forty years and, more important, to discuss what is still left to do to move us closer to an equal and high-performing society.

When and where
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Registration: 9:15 am
Program: 9:30 - 11:30 am
Economic Policy Institute
1333 H Street, NW, East Tower, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20005
[ RSVP below ]

Introduction
CHRISTIAN DORSEY
Outreach Coordinator, Economic Policy Institute

Opening remarks
DR. VALERIE RAWLSTON WILSON
Senior Resident Scholar, National Urban League Policy Institute
DR. ALAN CURTIS
President and CEO, Eisenhower Foundation
DR. JOHN IRONS
Research and Policy Director, Economic Policy Institute
DR. ALGERNON AUSTIN
Director of Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, Economic Policy Institute

Discussant
HILARY O. SHELTON
Director, NAACP-Washington Bureau
RSVP: Click here to reserve your seat now
________________________________________________________________________

Excellent Report on Race and Drug Arrests

If you're arrested for drugs, you're more likely to get a second chance if you're white.

Another High-Profile White Drug User

Busted: Miss Teen Louisiana skips on restaurant bill... but leaves behind purse stashed with drugs

Incarceration, crime, and African American economic outcomes

Crime and criminal justice policies are increasingly entangled with the economic outcomes of African Americans and particularly of black men. Since the 1970s when the U.S. embarked on “tough-on-crime” sentencing policies, the U.S. incarceration rate has skyrocketed. Prior to the 1970s, the U.S. incarceration rate was roughly 100 per 100,000 residents.

Today, the U.S. incarceration rate is about 700 per 100,000 residents. Although the United States leads the world in incarceration, it does not have the lowest crime rate. While the U.S. homicide rate is very high, the overall U.S. crime rate is within the range of other developed nations. Other developed nations, however, still have incarceration rates around 100 per 100,000 residents (Mauer 2006). [read more (PDF)]

Why crime prevention is better than incarceration

Incarceration is a necessary part of criminal justice, but the most effective riminal justice policies are those that prevent individuals from ever engaging in criminal activity. Below are six reasons why actively preventing crime is better than reactively responding to crime with incarceration. [read more (PDF)]



Share this article with a friend. Use the email icon below.

--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2008 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.