
Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - aaronbrethorst
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/?single_page=true
======
np422
I recall the ted talk
[http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_abo...](http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice),
if a black man is found guilty of murdering a white woman in Alabama, he is
400 times more likely to be sentenced to death compared to a white man found
guilty of murdering a black woman.

I sometimes think about what the reaction would be if statistics showed that
the German courts disproportionately often decided to sentence Jews to death?

Perhaps there are some things that could be improved within the penal system
in the United States?

~~~
theklub
You're not factoring in lawyers. They make a big difference. It has more to do
with money and less to do with race.

~~~
np422
Even if income could explain the whole difference it would still not be a very
agreeable explanation.

Even though it's a naive idea, I still think that everyone should be entitled
to the same level of legal support in a criminal case regardless of your
socio-economic status.

~~~
VLM
As helpful as that sounds, it still wouldn't help earlier in the pipeline
effects such as policing (a fighting kid in a white school is just a fighting
kid who gets de-escalated and a note sent home, a fighting kid in a black
school is arrested automatically). Or another difficult early pipeline area is
prosecution and plea bargains being racially different (the white kid gets a
plea offer for municipal loitering, the black kid gets prosecuted for
misdemeanor possession of burglary tools).

Explosive growth in income inequality makes the debate meaningless. There
won't be grades of legal support, they'll just be billionaires who above the
system and dirt poor peasants who get no support at all. Now (or recently) is
probably not a good cultural era to go into the defense attorney field, for
example. Being a defense attorney in an era where no one needs or can afford a
defense attorney is like being a really great star trek warp field engineer in
2015, thats nice but how do you pay your bills?

~~~
anigbrowl
That's why I dropped out of law school. I went to a large-ish legal conference
and realized how utterly hopeless the odds were, and decided to cut my losses.
I'm not proud of it but my mental health is too fragile for me to function
effectively under those conditions, which makes me worse than useless as an
advocate for anyone else.

------
powera
The article is framed in terms of the 1965 Moynihan report, so I feel I should
quote the recommendations Moynihan had at the time:

"Moynihan had lots of ideas about what government could do—provide a
guaranteed minimum income, establish a government jobs program, bring more
black men into the military, enable better access to birth control, integrate
the suburbs—but none of these ideas made it into the report."

Unfortunately, racists and demagogues eventually decided it was easier to just
throw people in prison and be done with it.

~~~
gdwatson
Moynihan's ideas didn't and don't fit neatly into an existing political
coalition on either side of the aisle. Supporters of enlarging social welfare
programs and supporters of the traditional, gendered nuclear family as a
normative institution are not quite disjoint sets, but the overlap has been
shrinking for decades.

------
tigurtron60001
I kept reading and reading, waiting for him to get to the point. He never
actually tries to refute Moynihan's central thesis, that destruction of the
black family and black men (by slavery, Jim Crow, and other things) is the
central problem facing black Americans, and the ideal issue to target for a
solution. Instead, it's mostly a bunch of meandering and frequently confusing
anecdotes [1], emotional descriptions of (awful and disturbing, let me not
dispute) white racism over the years, and pointing and sputtering at
Moynihan's conclusions [2]. Ultimately, he throws up his hands and says,
"Forget it! We just need reparations! Read this other article I wrote!" Well,
we happen to be in agreement. How does affirmative action not constitute
reparations? Because it's also provided to modern-day Somalian immigrants?
There's a pretty simple solution to that.

[1] _Odell Newton...shot and killed the driver...Odell had the very bulwark
that Moynihan treasured-a stable family-and it did not save him from
incarceration._ One guy with a stable family committed murder. Forget about
it, and just keep subsidizing single-parent households through TANF and WIC.

[2] _Discussing what he’d do about the problem among blacks in cities,
Moynihan said, “When these Negro G.I.s come back from Viet Nam, I would meet
them with a real estate agent, a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll, and a
list of jobs. I’d try to get half of them into the grade schools, teaching
kids who’ve never had anyone but women telling them what to do.” Everything
about this quote is wrong._ It's just wrong? That's it? You don't think kids
should have positive male role models, or you don't think veterans should have
help with housing and employment?

~~~
heygrady
> It's just wrong? That's it?

I would presume the author is rejecting a handful of stereotypes in the quoted
statement. I think the author was rejecting the sexist undertones of men being
preferable to "women telling [kids] what to do". And the sexist undertones of
introducing young men to "a girl who looks like Diahann Carroll." And the
tone-deafness of "meet them with a real estate agent." Maybe the author
thought showing Vietnam Veterans "a list of jobs" was also tone-deaf.

1) In the earlier article about reparations, there was a large section about
real estate red-lining. Importantly, minorities were not allowed to buy houses
outside of designated areas.
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-
case...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-
reparations/361631/#article-section-8)

2) There are any number of reasons that a military veteran may have difficulty
finding a job (PTSD?). Suggesting that they simply haven't looked is a little
bit insulting.
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/11/re...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/11/recent-
veterans-are-still-experiencing-double-digit-unemployment/)

3) While there are numerous claims of the importance of male role models,
these arguments are dubious. [http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Boys-Without-Men-
Exceptional/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Boys-Without-Men-
Exceptional/dp/1594865388)

4) I presume the bit about Diahann Carroll is suggesting that black men would
get married and stay married if they met a sufficiently sexy woman. I think
most people would consider that to be insulting.

------
anigbrowl
One wonders whether the relative fragility of black families made them the
unintentional first targets of efforts to dismantle patriarchal social
structures, putting them at a relative disadvantage to a more conservative (
_qua_ slow-moving) aggregate.

 _Moynihan [...] began pushing for a minimum income for all American families.
Nixon promoted Moynihan’s proposal — called the Family Assistance Plan —
before the American public in a television address in August of 1969, and
officially presented it to Congress in October._

For all his faults, Nixon was a much more radical president than is often
remembered today, though of course he also helped to launch the war on drugs,
the burden of which has historically fallen disproportionately on black
Americans. I wonder how things might have turned out differently if he had not
had to deal with the mess of the Viet Nam war when elected - though I suppose
you could argue that without that particular running sore, he would have had
much less incentive to undertake radical domestic reforms than he did. Would
love to get the perspective of older HNers on this issue, as I was born in
1970 and outside the US so my impressions of this period mainly come from
books.

~~~
mikeash
Given that Nixon sabotaged Vietnam peace talks in order to get elected, it
hardly seems reasonable to talk about that war as something he got
unfortunately stuck with.

~~~
anigbrowl
It's hard to sabotage peace talks if there isn't a war on already. I'm not
trying to rehabilitate his machinations and policies about Vietnam, but
speculating on what sort of President he might have been if the US hadn't been
at war to begin with. Mainly I'm interested in the contrast between the
general radicalism of the late 60s and the institutional conservatism of
today, rather than wanting to argue that Nixon was a great guy.

~~~
mikeash
My point is just that there was a chance (probably not a good one, but a
chance) to have the war end so that Nixon could be a peacetime President like
you're speculating about, and Nixon himself made sure that didn't happen.

I see what you're getting at, I just object to the presentation as the war as
something Nixon got saddled with, rather than something he actively worked to
have around for his own Presidency.

------
dudul
Was "anonymous justice" ever attempted? What if judges, juries and lawyers
worked on cases where the accused and the victim are anonymous. Neither their
sex, nor race, nor anything is disclose. Would they help fix these bias where
blacks get harsher sentences than whites and women lighter sentences than men
for example?

I don't know if it's realistic.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Was "anonymous justice" ever attempted?

No, and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

> What if judges, juries and lawyers worked on cases where the accused and the
> victim are anonymous.

How is the jury going to evaluate guilt or innocent based on evidence (whether
physical evidence or witness testimony) -- including, particularly, evidence
relating to the perpetrator, victim, and the details of their interactions
that are essential to the question of guilt or innocence of the crime, if the
identities, sex, race, etc., of the accused and the victim(s) are obscured
from the jury?

What you _might_ plausibly do is remove sentencing from the trial court, and
anonymize the bare findings of fact before forwarding them to a separate body
that handles sentencing. That might have some utility, though it would still
be subject to bias in the trial courts actually in completing the findings of
fact used for determining sentence.

~~~
dudul
How is sex, race etc required to evaluate guilt or innocent?

What you suggest in your last paragraph is pretty much what I had in mind.
Facts would be gathered and then anonymized before being used for sentencing.
Instead of "this black guy raped this white woman" they would make their
decision based on "this person raped this other".

~~~
dragonwriter
> How is sex, race etc required to evaluate guilt or innocent?

It's pretty relevant to evaluating whether a particular piece of evidence
(whether a video or photograph, a witness description, etc.) implicates the
guilt or innocence of the particular person charged with the crime. Which is,
after all, _the whole job of the jury_.

> What you suggest in your last paragraph is pretty much what I had in mind.
> Facts would be gathered and then anonymized before being used for
> sentencing.

What I discuss in the last paragraph is something that can only happen _after_
the jury has found the facts in a process in which the jury, judge, and
lawyers knew who the victims and accused were.

------
anigbrowl
_Beyond that, there’s the expense of having to make long drives to prisons
that are commonly built in rural white regions, far from the incarcerated’s
family._

It suits some politicians to have a large prison in their district, since the
inmate population is included in calculations of representation (in accordance
with the Constitutional design for representative government), but as the
inmates can't vote, the number of people the congressperson has to actually
answer to is that much smaller.

[http://www.demos.org/publication/census-count-and-
prisoners-...](http://www.demos.org/publication/census-count-and-prisoners-
problem-solutions-and-what-census-can-do)

------
happyscrappy
We could really use someone like Moynihan these days but sadly none compare.
How is Obama so silent on these issues?

~~~
anigbrowl
Have you not noticed how bitterly his comments are rejected when he does
comment on them? I'd imagine that this will be his signature post-presidency
issue, as he established a foundation called 'My Brother's Keeper' that aims
to address the specific problems of black male youth. But you have people on
the left demanding that he tear down the entire structure of white patriarchy,
and people on eh right insisting that this is all he has done since taking
office.

