Coates-The Black Family in The Age of Mass Incarceration

11/23/2015 50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The
Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic
The Black Family in the Age of Mass

Incarceration
American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system
that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But
they've failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick
Moynihan’s report “The Negro Family” tragically helped create this system,
it's time to reclaim his original intent.
Clara Newton at her home outside Baltimore, holding a picture of her son Odell, who has been in prison for 41
years for a crime he committed when he was 16. State officials have recommended Odell for release three times
since 1992, but he has not been freed. August 4, 2015.
Greg Kahn
TA-NEHISI COATES
OCTOBER 2015 ISSUE | POLITICS
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/ 1/73
11/23/2015 50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic
Never marry again in slavery.
— Margaret Garner, 1858
Wherever the law is, crime can be found.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1973
CHAPTERS
I. “Lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”

II. “We are incarcerating too few criminals.”
III. “You don’t take a shower after 9 o’clock.”
IV. “The crime-stained blackness of the Negro”
V. The “baddest generation any society has ever known.”
VI. “It’s like I’m in prison with him.”
VII. “Our value system became surviving versus living.”
VIII. “The Negro poor having become more openly violent.”
IX. “Now comes the proposition that the Negro is entitled to damages.”
I.
“LOWER-CLASS BEHAVIOR IN OUR CITIES IS SHAKING THEM APART.”
By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator,
sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken
home and a pathological family [1] . He was born
[1] James Patterson’s Freedom Is
Not Enough furnished much of the
in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in
biographical information in this New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years
section. Patterson’s book is
deeply sympathetic to Moynihan in
old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it
ways that I don’t quite agree with, into poverty. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret,
but I found it invaluable for
understanding Moynihan as a
remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to
human. Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to
New York, where she worked as a nurse.
Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and
single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life
he would later extol. “My relations are obviously those of divided allegiance,”
Moynihan wrote in a diary he kept during the 1950s. “Apparently I loved the
old man very much yet had to take sides … choosing mom in spite of loving
pop.” In the same journal, Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of
analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and
father—They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous
emotional attachment to Father substitutes—of whom the least rejection was
cause for untold agonies—the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings
towards dad.”
More from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s October cover story

Read more
As a teenager, Moynihan divided his time between his studies and working at
the docks in Manhattan to help out his family. In 1943, he tested into the City
College of New York, walking into the examination room with a
longshoreman’s loading hook in his back pocket so that he would not “be
mistaken for any sissy kid.” After a year at CCNY, he enlisted in the Navy,
which paid for him to go to Tufts University for a bachelor’s degree. He
stayed for a master’s degree and then started a doctorate program, which
took him to the London School of Economics, where he did research. In
1959, Moynihan began writing for Irving Kristol’s magazine The Reporter,
covering everything from organized crime to auto safety. The election of John
F. Kennedy as president, in 1960, gave Moynihan a chance to put his broad
curiosity to practical use; he was hired as an aide in the Department of Labor.
Moynihan was, by then, an anticommunist liberal with a strong belief in the
power of government to both study and solve social problems. He was also
something of a scenester. His fear of being taken for a “sissy kid” had
diminished. In London, he’d cultivated a love of wine, fine cheeses, tailored
suits, and the mannerisms of an English aristocrat. He stood six feet five
inches tall. A cultured civil servant not to the manor born, Moynihan—witty,
colorful, loquacious—charmed the Washington elite, moving easily among
congressional aides, politicians, and journalists. As the historian James
Patterson writes in Freedom Is Not Enough, his book about Moynihan, he was
possessed by “the optimism of youth.” He believed in the marriage of
government and social science to formulate policy. “All manner of later
experiences in politics were to test this youthful faith.”
Moynihan stayed on at the Labor Department during Lyndon B. Johnson’s
administration, but became increasingly disillusioned with Johnson’s War on
Poverty. He believed that the initiative should be run through an established
societal institution: the patriarchal family. Fathers should be supported by
public policy, in the form of jobs funded by the government. Moynihan
believed that unemployment, specifically male unemployment, was the
biggest impediment to the social mobility of the poor. He was, it might be
said, a conservative radical who disdained service programs such as Head
Start and traditional welfare programs such as Aid to Families With
Dependent Children, and instead imagined a broad national program that
subsidized families through jobs programs for men and a guaranteed
minimum income for every family.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as an adviser to President Nixon, promoted a guaranteed minimum income
for all families, in part to help unravel the “tangle of pathology” he had famously diagnosed in his
report on “The Negro Family.” August 25, 1969. (Associated Press)
Influenced by the civil-rights movement, Moynihan focused on the black
family. He believed that an undue optimism about the pending passage of
civil-rights legislation was obscuring a pressing problem: a deficit of
employed black men of strong character. He believed that this deficit went a
long way toward explaining the African American community’s relative
poverty. Moynihan began searching for a way to press the point within the
Johnson administration. “I felt I had to write a paper about the Negro family,”
Moynihan later recalled, “to explain to the fellows how there was a problem
more difficult than they knew.” In March of 1965, Moynihan printed up 100
copies of a report he and a small staff had labored over for only a few months.
RELATED STORY
The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition
The report was called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
Unsigned, it was meant to be an internal government document, with only
one copy distributed at first and the other 99 kept locked in a vault. Running
against the tide of optimism around civil rights, “The Negro Family” argued
that the federal government was underestimating the damage done to black
families by “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment” as
well as a “racist virus in the American blood stream,” which would continue
to plague blacks in the future:
That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a
lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have …
But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community
has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to
which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.
That price was clear to Moynihan. “The Negro family, battered and harassed
by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble,” he
wrote. “While many young Negroes are moving ahead to unprecedented
levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.”
Out-of-wedlock births were on the rise, and with them, welfare dependency,
while the unemployment rate among black men remained high. Moynihan
believed that at the core of all these problems lay a black family structure
mutated by white oppression:
In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a
matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest
of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group
as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and,
in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.
Moynihan believed this matriarchal structure robbed black men of their
birthright—“The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to
the four-star general, is to strut,” he wrote—and deformed the black family
and, consequently, the black community. In what would become the most
famous passage in the report, Moynihan equated the black community with a
diseased patient:
In a word, most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the
tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a
majority are so entrapped. Many of those who escape do so for one
generation only: as things now are, their children may have to run
the gauntlet all over again. That is not the least vicious aspect of the
world that white America has made for the Negro.
RELATED STORY
The Other Half of the Moynihan Report
Despite its alarming predictions, “The Negro Family” was a curious
government report in that it advocated no specific policies to address the
crisis it described. This was intentional. 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. “A series of recommendations was at first
included, then left out,” Moynihan later recalled. “It would have got in the
way of the attention-arousing argument that a crisis was coming and that
family stability was the best measure of success or failure in dealing with it.”
President Johnson offered the first public preview of the Moynihan Report in
a speech written by Moynihan and the former Kennedy aide Richard
Goodwin at Howard University in June of 1965, in which he highlighted “the
breakdown of the Negro family structure.” Johnson left no doubt about how
this breakdown had come about [2] . “For this, most of all, wh
[2] In the quest to understand the must accept responsibility,” Johnson said. Family

politics around the Moynihan breakdown “flows from centuries of oppression
Report, and how it was written,
Lee Rainwater and William L. and persecution of the Negro man. It flows from
Yancey’s investigation, The the long years of degradation and discrimination,
Moynihan Report and the Politics
of Controversy proved key. It has which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his
the advantage of being both well- ability to produce for his family.”
researched and contemporaneous
—the book was published two
years after the Moynihan Report. It
The press did not generally greet Johnson’s
was a rich source of primary speech as a claim of white responsibility, but
documents, collecting the
responses to the report for and
rather as a condemnation of “the failure of Negro
against around the time of family life,” as the journalist Mary McGrory put
publication.
it. This interpretation was reinforced as second-
and thirdhand accounts of the Moynihan Report,
which had not been made public, began making the rounds. On August 18,
the widely syndicated newspaper columnists Rowland Evans and Robert
Novak wrote that Moynihan’s document had exposed “the breakdown of the
Negro family,” with its high rates of “broken homes, illegitimacy, and
female-oriented homes.” These dispatches fell on all-too-receptive ears. A
week earlier, the drunk-driving arrest of Marquette Frye, an African
American man in Los Angeles, had sparked six days of rioting in the city,
which killed 34 people, injured 1,000 more, and caused tens of millions of
dollars in property damage. Meanwhile, crime rates had begun to rise. People
who read the newspapers but were not able to read the report could—and did
—conclude that Johnson was conceding that no government effort could
match the “tangle of pathology” that Moynihan had said beset the black
family. Moynihan’s aim in writing “The Negro Family” had been to muster
support for an all-out government assault on the structural social problems
that held black families down. (“Family as an issue raised the possibility of
enlisting the support of conservative groups for quite radical social
programs,” he would later write.) Instead his report was portrayed as an
argument for leaving the black family to fend for itself.
 0:00 / 3:10   
An interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, exploring the myth of black criminality.
Moynihan himself was partly to blame for this. In its bombastic language, its
omission of policy recommendations, its implication that black women were
obstacles to black men’s assuming their proper station, and its unnecessarily
covert handling, the Moynihan Report militated against its author’s aims.
James Farmer, the civil-rights activist and a co-founder of the Congress of
Racial Equality, attacked the report from the left as “a massive academic cop-
out for the white conscience.” William Ryan, the psychologist who first
articulated the concept of “blaming the victim,” accused Moynihan’s report
of doing just that. Moynihan had left the Johnson administration in the
summer to run for president of the New York City Council. The bid failed,
and liberal repudiations of the report kept raining down. “I am now known as
a racist across the land,” he wrote in a letter to the civil-rights leader Roy
Wilkins.
The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent

of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its
incarcerated inhabitants.
In fact, the controversy transformed Moynihan into one of the most
celebrated public intellectuals of his era. In the summer of 1966, Moynihan
was featured in The New York Times. In the fall of 1967, after Detroit had
exploded into riots, Life magazine dubbed him the “Idea Broker in the Race
Crisis,” declaring, “A troubled nation turns to Pat Moynihan.” Between 1965
and 1979, The New York Times Magazine ran five features on Moynihan. His
own writing was featured in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Commentary, The
American Scholar, The Saturday Evening Post, The Public Interest, and
elsewhere. Yet despite the positive coverage, Moynihan remained “distressed
not to have any influence on anybody” in Washington, as he put it in a 1968
letter to Harry McPherson, a Johnson aide.
Meanwhile, the civil-rights movement was fading and the radical New Left
was rising. In September of 1967, worried about political instability in the
country, Moynihan gave a speech calling for liberals and conservatives to
unite “to preserve democratic institutions from the looming forces of the
authoritarian left and right.” Impressed by the speech, Richard Nixon offered
Moynihan a post in the White House the following year. Moynihan was, by
then, embittered by the attacks launched against him [3] and, like Nixon,
horrified by the late-’60s radical spirit.
[3] Two books proved helpful in
understanding Moynihan in his
post-Johnson years. Daniel Patrick
But Moynihan still professed concern for the
Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of family, and for the black family in particular. He
an American Visionary edited by
Steven R. Weisman, and The
began pushing for a minimum income for all
Professor and the President: American families. Nixon promoted Moynihan’s
Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the
Nixon White House by Stephen
proposal—called the Family Assistance Plan—
Hess. The first is a compilation of before the American public in a television address
primary sources on Moynihan that
allows one to get past the rhetoric
in August of 1969, and officially presented it to
and get to the man, himself. Congress in October. This was a personal victory
Hess’s book is a sympathetic
memoir of Nixon and Moynihan’s
for Moynihan—a triumph in an argument he had
time together in the White House.

been waging since the War on Poverty began,
over the need to help families, not individuals. “I
felt I was finally rid of a subject. A subject that just … spoiled my life,”
Moynihan told The New York Times that November. “Four—long—years of
being called awful things. The people you would most want to admire you
detesting you. Being anathematized and stigmatized. And I said, ‘Well, the
President’s done this, and now I’m rid of it.’ ”
But he was not rid of it. The Family Assistance Plan died in the Senate. In a
1972 essay in The Public Interest, Moynihan, who had by then left the White
House and was a professor at Harvard, railed against “the poverty
professionals” who had failed to support his efforts and the “upper-class”
liars who had failed to see his perspective. He pointed out that his pessimistic
predictions were now becoming reality. Crime was increasing. So were the
number of children in poor, female-headed families. Moynihan issued a dire
warning: “Lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”
But America had an app for that.
From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled,
from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the
mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a historic
high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a modest decline to 707
people per 100,000 in 2012. In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail
population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some
300,000 people to 2.2 million. The United States now accounts for less than
5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated
inhabitants. In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40
was incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of
all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were
imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers.
Our carceral state banishes American citizens to a gray wasteland far beyond
the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens.
Banishment continues long after one’s actual time behind bars has ended,
making housing and employment hard to secure. And banishment was not
simply a well-intended response to rising crime. It was the method by which
we chose to address the problems that preoccupied Moynihan, problems
resulting from “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment.”
At a cost of $80 billion a year, American correctional facilities are a social-
service program—providing health care, meals, and shelter for a whole class
of people.
As the civil-rights movement wound down, Moynihan looked out and saw a
black population reeling under the effects of 350 years of bondage and
plunder. He believed that these effects could be addressed through state
action. They were—through the mass incarceration of millions of black
people.
II.
“WE ARE INCARCERATING TOO FEW CRIMINALS.”
The Gray Wastes—our carceral state, a sprawling netherworld of prisons and
jails—are a relatively recent invention. Through the middle of the 20th
century, America’s imprisonment rate hovered at about 110 people per
100,000. Presently, America’s incarceration rate (which accounts for people
in prisons and jails) is roughly 12 times the rate in Sweden, eight times the
rate in Italy, seven times the rate in Canada, five times the rate in Australia,
and four times the rate in Poland. America’s closest to-scale competitor is
Russia—and with an autocratic Vladimir Putin locking up about 450 people
per 100,000, compared with our 700 or so, it isn’t much of a competition.
China has about four times America’s population, but American jails and
prisons hold half a million more people. “In short,” an authoritative report
issued last year by the National Research Council concluded, “the current
U.S. rate of incarceration is unprecedented by both historical and
comparative standards.”
What caused this? Crime would seem the obvious culprit: Between 1963 and
1993, the murder rate doubled, the robbery rate quadrupled, and the
aggravated-assault rate nearly quintupled. But the relationship between
crime and incarceration is more discordant than it appears. Imprisonment
rates actually fell from the 1960s through the early ’70s, even as violent
crime increased. From the mid-’70s to the late ’80s, both imprisonment rates
and violent-crime rates rose. Then, from the early ’90s to the present,
violent-crime rates fell while imprisonment rates increased.
(Robert Sampson. Data from: Bureau of Justice Statistics; Sourcebook of Criminal Justice
Statistics; Uniform Crime Reporting System.)
The incarceration rate rose independent of crime—but not of criminal-justice
policy. [4] Derek Neal, an economist at the
[4] For more, see Derek Neal and
Armin Rick’s working paper “The
University of Chicago, has found that by the early
Prison Boom & the Lack of Black 2000s, a suite of tough-on-crime laws had made
Progress after Smith and Welch.”
It’s a very technical paper, but
prison sentences much more likely than in the
indispensable for understanding past. Examining a sample of states, Neal found
how we got here.
that from 1985 to 2000, the likelihood of a long
prison sentence nearly doubled for drug
possession, tripled for drug trafficking, and quintupled for nonaggravated
assault.
That explosion in rates and duration of imprisonment might be justified on
grounds of cold pragmatism if a policy of mass incarceration actually caused
crime to decline. Which is precisely what some politicians and policy makers
of the tough-on-crime ’90s were claiming. “Ask many politicians, newspaper
editors, or criminal justice ‘experts’ about our prisons, and you will hear that
our problem is that we put too many people in prison,” a 1992 Justice
Department report read. “The truth, however, is to the contrary; we are
incarcerating too few criminals, and the public is suffering as a result.”
History has not been kind to this conclusion. [5]
[5] For more see Michael Tonry
and David P. Farrington’s
The rise and fall in crime in the late 20th century
“Punishment and Crime across was an international phenomenon. Crime rates
Space and Time.” For calculations
on the effects of mass
rose and fell in the United States and Canada at
incarceration on crime, see Bruce roughly the same clip—but in Canada,
Western Punishment and
Inequality in America, Chapter 7
imprisonment rates held steady. “If greatly
—“Did the Prison Boom Cause the increased severity of punishment and higher
Crime Drop?” Beyond the
numbers on this, Western’s text
imprisonment rates caused American crime rates
was indispensible in helping me to fall after 1990,” the researchers Michael
understand the mechanics of mass
incarceration and how it affected

Tonry and David P. Farrington have written, then
the lives of young black men.
“what caused the Canadian rates to fall?” The
riddle is not particular to North America. In the
latter half of the 20th century, crime rose and then fell in Nordic countries as
well. During the period of rising crime, incarceration rates held steady in
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—but declined in Finland. “If punishment
affects crime, Finland’s crime rate should have shot up,” Tonry and
Farrington write, but it did not. After studying California’s tough “Three
Strikes and You’re Out” law—which mandated at least a 25-year sentence for
a third “strikeable offense,” such as murder or robbery—researchers at UC
Berkeley and the University of Sydney, in Australia, determined in 2001 that
the law had reduced the rate of felony crime by no more than 2 percent.
Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard and one of the leading academic
experts on American incarceration, looked at the growth in state prisons in
recent years and concluded that a 66 percent increase in the state prison
population between 1993 and 2001 had reduced the rate of serious crime by
a modest 2 to 5 percent—at a cost to taxpayers of $53 billion.
From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s

incarceration rate doubled. From the mid-’80s to the
mid-’90s, it doubled again. Then it went still higher.
This bloating of the prison population may not have reduced crime much, but
it increased misery among the group that so concerned Moynihan. Among all
black males born since the late 1970s, one in four went to prison by their
mid-‘30s; among those who dropped out of high school, seven in 10 did.
“Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most
marginalized groups,” Devah Pager, a sociologist at Harvard, has written.
“Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition
to adulthood.”
The emergence of the carceral state has had far-reaching consequences for
the economic viability of black families. Employment and poverty statistics
traditionally omit the incarcerated from the official numbers. When Western
recalculated the jobless rates for the year 2000 to include incarcerated young
black men, he found that joblessness among all young black men went from
24 to 32 percent; among those who never went to college, it went from 30 to
42 percent. The upshot is stark. Even in the booming ’90s, when nearly every
American demographic group improved its economic position, black men
were left out. The illusion of wage and employment progress among African
American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most
vulnerable among them from the official statistics.
These consequences for black men have radiated out to their families. By
2000, more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison—and
roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids
when they were locked up. Paternal incarceration is associated with behavior
problems and delinquency, especially among boys.


Baltimore police respond to a call at the Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray was arrested before
sustaining a fatal spinal injury in April while in police custody. July 28, 2015. (Greg Kahn)
“More than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary
breadwinner in their family,” the National Research Council report noted.
Should the family attempt to stay together through incarceration, the loss of
income only increases, as the mother must pay for phone time, travel costs
for visits, and legal fees. The burden continues after the father returns home,
because a criminal record tends to injure employment prospects. [6] Through
it all, the children suffer.
[6] For more the National Research
Council’s The Growth of
Incarceration in the United States
Many fathers simply fall through the cracks after
is really an atlas of the Gray they’re released. It is estimated that between 30
Wastes. Written by a committee of
some of the most distinguished
and 50 percent of all parolees in Los Angeles and
scholars on the subject, the report San Francisco are homeless. In that context—
addresses any question you could
possibly have about mass
employment prospects diminished, cut off from
incarceration. You can read it one’s children, nowhere to live—one can readily
straight through. But it works just
as well as an encyclopedia.
see the difficulty of eluding the ever-present
grasp of incarceration, even once an individual is
physically out of prison. Many do not elude its grasp. In 1984, 70 percent of
all parolees successfully completed their term without arrest and were
granted full freedom. In 1996, only 44 percent did. As of 2013, 33 percent
do.
The Gray Wastes differ in both size and mission from the penal systems of
earlier eras. As African Americans began filling cells in the 1970s,
rehabilitation was largely abandoned in favor of retribution—the idea that
prison should not reform convicts but punish them. For instance, in the
1990s, South Carolina cut back on in-prison education, banned air
conditioners, jettisoned televisions, and discontinued intramural sports.
Over the next 10 years, Congress repeatedly attempted to pass a No Frills
Prison Act, which would have granted extra funds to state correctional
systems working to “prevent luxurious conditions in prisons.” A goal of this
“penal harm” movement, one criminal-justice researcher wrote at the time,
was to find “creative strategies to make offenders suffer.”
III.
“YOU DON’T TAKE A SHOWER AFTER 9 O’CLOCK.”
Last winter, I visited Detroit to take the measure of the Gray Wastes.
Michigan, with an incarceration rate of 628 people per 100,000, is about
average for an American state. I drove to the East Side to talk with a woman
I’ll call Tonya, who had done 18 years for murder and a gun charge and had
been released five months earlier. She had an energetic smile and an edge to
her voice that evidenced the time she’d spent locked up. Violence, for her,
commenced not in the streets, but at home. “There was abuse in my
grandmother’s home, and I went to school and I told my teacher,” she
explained. “I had a spot on my nose because I had a lit cigarette stuck on my
nose, and when I told her, they sent me to a temporary foster-care home …
The foster parent was also abusive, so I just ran away from her and just stayed
on the streets.”
Tonya began using crack. One night she gathered with some friends for a
party. They smoked crack. They smoked marijuana. They drank. At some
point, the woman hosting the party claimed that someone had stolen money
from her home. Another woman accused Tonya of stealing it. A fight ensued.
Tonya shot the woman who had accused her. She got 20 years for the murder
and two for the gun. After the trial, the truth came out. The host had hidden
the money, but was so high that she’d forgotten.
When the doors finally close and one finds oneself facing banishment to the
carceral state—the years, the walls, the rules, the guards, the inmates—
reactions vary. Some experience an intense sickening feeling. Others, a
strong desire to sleep. Visions of suicide. A deep shame. A rage directed
toward guards and other inmates. Utter disbelief. The incarcerated attempt
to hold on to family and old social ties through phone calls and visitations. At
first, friends and family do their best to keep up. But phone calls to prison are
expensive, and many prisons are located far from one’s hometown.
Over the past half century, deindustrialization has ravaged much of Detroit. African Americans have
had to deal not just with vanishing jobs but with persistent racism. (Greg Kahn)
“First I would get one [visit] like every four months,” Tonya explained to me.
“And then I wouldn’t get none for like maybe a year. You know, because it
was too far away. And I started to have losses. I lost my mom, my brothers …
So it was hard, you know, for me to get visits.”
As the visits and phone calls diminish, the incarcerated begins to adjust to the
fact that he or she is, indeed, a prisoner. New social ties are cultivated. New
rules must be understood. A blizzard of acronyms, sayings, and jargon—PBF,
CSC, ERD, “letters but no numbers”—must be comprehended. If the prisoner
is lucky, someone—a cell mate, an older prisoner hailing from the same
neighborhood—takes him under his wing. This can be the difference between
survival and catastrophe. On Richard Braceful’s first night in Carson City
Correctional Facility, in central Michigan, where he had been sent away at
age 29 for armed robbery, he decided to take a shower. It was 10 p.m. His
cell mate stopped him. “Where are you going?” the cell mate asked. “I’m
going to take a shower,” Braceful responded. His cell mate, a 14-year veteran
of the prison system, blocked his way and said, “You’re not going to take a
shower.” Braceful, reading the signs, felt a fight was imminent. “Calm
down,” his cell mate told him. “You don’t take a shower after 9 o’clock.
People that are sexual predators, people that are rapists, they go in the
showers right behind you.” Braceful and the veteran sat down. The veteran
looked at him. “It’s your first time being locked up, ain’t it?” he said. “Yeah, it
is,” Braceful responded. The veteran said to him, “Listen, this is what you
have to do. For the next couple of weeks, just stay with me. I’ve been here for
14 years. I’ll look out for you until you learn how to move around in here
without getting yourself hurt.”
Michigan prisons assign each inmate to a level corresponding to the security
risk the inmate is believed to pose. As the levels decrease, privileges—yard
time, for instance—increase. Level V is maximum security. Level I is for
prisoners who will soon be released. At Level IV, you will find many prisoners
with life sentences and not many prisoners with fewer than five years left to
serve. A prisoner with a life sentence who has reached Level II has generally
proved that he or she is not a danger to others. But there are very few such
prisoners, because it is very hard to remain at the more draconian levels
without acquiring “tickets”—demerits for violating prison protocol, often
involving fighting. “It’s hard to stay ticket-free for 10 years without
somebody getting stabbed, somebody getting into a fight,” Braceful, who is
now out of prison, explained to me when I visited him in Detroit last
December. “Because there are people that are there who might look at you
and go, ‘He’s a small guy. I’m gonna take advantage of him.’ ”
When this happens, a prisoner can decide either to defend himself or to “lock
up”—that is, to report to the guards that he fears for his safety. The guards
will then place the prisoner in solitary confinement for his own protection.
“Those are my only two choices,” Braceful explained. “And if you lock up,
everybody know you lock up. When you come back out, you gonna have a
bigger problem.”
“Because you’re prey,” I said.
“Exactly,” he responded. “So you fight, you know. And when the fight gets
serious enough, you gotta find something to stab with, you gotta find
something, you know, you gotta make your weapon, you gotta do
something.”
Richard Braceful, who served several years in the Michigan prison system, photographed at his home
in Detroit. August 9, 2015. (Greg Kahn)
Michigan leads the country in the average length of a prison stay—4.3 years—
yet most prisoners do eventually say goodbye. The bliss of freedom, the joy of
family reunion, can quickly be tempered by the challenge of staying free. The
transition can be jarring. “I panicked,” Tonya told me, speaking of how it felt
to be out of prison after 18 years. “I was only used to a cell as opposed to
having multiple rooms, and there was always somebody there with me in the
cell—whether it was a bunkie or officer, somebody’s always in this building.
To go from that to this? I stayed on the phone. I made people call me, you
know. It was scary. And I still experience that to this day. Everybody looks
suspect to me. I’m like, ‘He’s up to something.’ A friend of mine told me,
‘You’ve been gone a long time, over a decade, so it’s gonna take you about
two years for you to readjust.’ ”
The challenges of housing and employment bedevil many ex-offenders. “It’s
very common for them to go homeless,” Linda VanderWaal, the associate
director of prisoner reentry at a community-action agency in Michigan, told
me. In the winter, VanderWaal says, she has a particularly hard time finding
places to accommodate all the homeless ex-prisoners. Those who do find a
place to live often find it difficult to pay their rent.
The carceral state has, in effect, become a credentialing institution as
significant as the military, public schools, or universities—but the
credentialing that prison or jail offers is negative. In her book, Marked: Race,
Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration, Devah Pager, the
Harvard sociologist, notes that most employers say that they would not hire a
job applicant with a criminal record. “These employers appear less concerned
about specific information conveyed by a criminal conviction and its bearing
on a particular job,” Pager writes, “but rather view this credential as an
indicator of general employability or trustworthiness.”
One in four black men born since the late 1970s has
spent time in prison.
Ex-offenders are excluded from a wide variety of jobs, running the gamut
from septic-tank cleaner to barber to real-estate agent, depending on the
state. And in the limited job pool that ex-offenders can swim in, blacks and
whites are not equal. For her research, Pager pulled together four testers to
pose as men looking for low-wage work. One white man and one black man
would pose as job seekers without a criminal record, and another black man
and white man would pose as job seekers with a criminal record. The negative
credential of prison impaired the employment efforts of both the black man
and the white man, but it impaired those of the black man more. Startlingly,
the effect was not limited to the black man with a criminal record. The black
man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one.
“High levels of incarceration cast a shadow of criminality over all black men,
implicating even those (in the majority) who have remained crime free,”
Pager writes. Effectively, the job market in America regards black men who
have never been criminals as though they were [7] .
[7] Devah Pager’s book Marked Just as ex-offenders had to learn to acculturate

gives some sense of how the
themselves to prison, they have to learn to re-
effects of mass incarceration have
spread beyond the prisons, and acculturate themselves to the outside. But the
even beyond the previously
attitude that helps one survive in prison is almost
imprisoned, and now affect those
who are thought to have been the opposite of the kind needed to make it
imprisoned. One of the great
outside. Craig Haney, a professor at UC Santa
challenges reformers will have to
face is not merely reforming the Cruz who studies the cognitive and psychological
prison system, but reckoning with
effects of incarceration, has observed: [8]
the broad secondary damage
wrought by our policies.
[8] From Craig Haney’s book

A tough veneer that precludes seeking help
Reforming Punishment: for personal problems, the generalized
Psychological Limits to the Pains
of Imprisonment
mistrust that comes from the fear of
exploitation, and a tendency to strike out in
response to minimal provocations are highly functional in many
prison contexts but problematic virtually everywhere else.
Linda VanderWaal told me that re-acculturation is essential to thriving in an
already compromised job market. “I hate to say this, but it’s a reality,” she
said. “Making eye contact, the way they walk—people judge you the moment
you walk in the doors for an interview … We literally practice eye contact,
smiling, handshaking, how you’re sitting.”

 0:00 / 2:28   
The sociologist Bruce Western explains the current inevitability of prison for certain demographics
of young black men.
In America, the men and women who find themselves lost in the Gray Wastes
are not picked at random. A series of risk factors—mental illness, illiteracy,
drug addiction, poverty—increases one’s chances of ending up in the ranks of
the incarcerated. “Roughly half of today’s prison inmates are functionally
illiterate,” Robert Perkinson, an associate professor of American studies at
the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, has noted [9] .
[9] The quote is from Robert
Perkinson’s Texas Tough: The
“Four out of five criminal defendants qualify as
Rise of America’s Prison Empire, a indigent before the courts.” Sixty-eight percent of
deeply disturbing history of the
modern era of mass incarceration.
jail inmates were struggling with substance
There is good deal of sociological dependence or abuse in 2002. One can imagine a
and economic study on mass
incarceration, but considerably
separate world where the state would see these
less in the way of history. What I maladies through the lens of government
would love to see is a book that
took the long view of
education or public-health programs. Instead it
incarceration, crime, and racism. has decided to see them through the lens of
Too many accounts begin in the
1960s. At any rate Perkinson’s
criminal justice. As the number of prison beds has
book is a crucial contribution to risen in this country, the number of public-
the literature in that it tells us
precisely how we got here.
psychiatric-hospital beds has fallen. The Gray
Wastes draw from the most socioeconomically
unfortunate among us, and thus take particular interest in those who are
black.
IV.
“THE CRIME-STAINED BLACKNESS OF THE NEGRO”
It is impossible to conceive of the Gray Wastes without first conceiving of a
large swath of its inhabitants as both more than criminal and less than
human. These inhabitants, black people, are the preeminent outlaws of the
American imagination. Black criminality is literally written into the American
Constitution—the Fugitive Slave Clause, in Article IV of that document,
declared that any “Person held to Service or Labour” who escaped from one
state to another could be “delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such
Service or Labour may be due.” From America’s very founding, the pursuit of
the right to labor, and the right to live free of whipping and of the sale of one’s
children, were verboten for blacks.
The crime of absconding was thought to be linked to other criminal
inclinations among blacks. Pro-slavery intellectuals sought to defend the
system as “commanded by God” and “approved by Christ.” In 1860, The
New York Herald offered up a dispatch on the doings of runaway slaves
residing in Canada. “The criminal calendars would be bare of a prosecution
but for the negro prisoners,” the report claimed. Deprived of slavery’s
blessings, blacks quickly devolved into criminal deviants who plied their
trade with “a savage ferocity peculiar to the vicious negro.” Blacks, the report
stated, were preternaturally inclined to rape: “When the lust comes over
them they are worse than the wild beast of the forest.” Nearly a century and a
half before the infamy of Willie Horton, a portrait emerged of blacks as highly
prone to criminality, and generally beyond the scope of rehabilitation. In this
fashion, black villainy justified white oppression—which was seen not as
oppression but as “the corner-stone of our republican edifice.” [10]
[10] Taken from Cotton Is King, and To fortify the “republican edifice,” acts

Pro-Slavery Arguments, crucial
considered legal when committed by whites were
text in understanding the
perspective of pro-slavery judged criminal when committed by blacks. In
intellectuals. Michelle Alexander
has taken some criticism for

1850, a Missouri man named Robert Newsom
asserting, in her book The New
Jim Crow, the connections purchased a girl named Celia, who was about 14
between slavery, Jim Crow, and
years old. For the next five years, he repeatedly
mass incarceration. Honestly, I
was one of skeptics. But having raped her. Celia birthed at least one child by
finished this research, I really have
Newsom. When she became pregnant again, she
to applaud Alexander’s attempt to
connect mass incarceration with begged Newsom to “quit forcing her while she
American history. I don’t totally
was sick.” He refused, and one day in June of
agree with the book (I think linking
crime and black struggle is even 1855 informed Celia that he “was coming to her
older than she does, for instance)
cabin that night.” When Newsom arrived and
but I think The New Jim Crow
pursues the right line of attempted to rape Celia again, she grabbed a stick
questioning. I don’t think mass
“about as large as the upper part of a Windsor
incarceration happens without the
rise in crime. But there are all chair” and beat Newsom to death. A judge
kinds of ways one can respond to
rejected Celia’s self-defense claim, and she was
a crime surge. Mass incarceration
is appropriate only if you already found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.
believe that certain people
While she was in jail, she gave birth to the child,
weren’t really fit for freedom in the
first place. who arrived stillborn. Not long after, Celia was
hanged.
Celia’s status—black, enslaved, female—transformed an act of self-defense
into an act of villainy. Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard, writes
that “many jurisdictions made slaves into ‘criminals’ by prohibiting them
from pursuing a wide range of activities that whites were typically free to
pursue.” Among these activities were:
learning to read, leaving their masters’ property without a proper
pass, engaging in “unbecoming” conduct in the presence of a white
female, assembling to worship outside the supervisory presence of
a white person, neglecting to step out of the way when a white
person approached on a walkway, smoking in public, walking with
a cane, making loud noises, or defending themselves from
assaults.
Antebellum Virginia had 73 crimes that could garner the death penalty for
slaves—and only one for whites.
The end of enslavement posed an existential crisis for white supremacy,
because an open labor market meant blacks competing with whites for jobs
and resources, and—most frightening—black men competing for the
attention of white women. Postbellum Alabama solved this problem by
manufacturing criminals. Blacks who could not find work were labeled
vagrants and sent to jail, where they were leased as labor to the very people
who had once enslaved them. Vagrancy laws were nominally color-blind but,
Kennedy writes, “applied principally, if not exclusively, against Negroes.”
Some vagrancy laws were repealed during Reconstruction, but as late as the
Great Depression, cash-strapped authorities in Miami were found rounding
up black “vagrants” and impressing them into sanitation work.
“Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a U.S. senator from

South Carolina, who advocated lynching black
men to keep them from raping white women.
(Library of Congress)
“From the 1890s through the first four decades of the twentieth century,”
writes Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, “black criminality
would become one of the most commonly cited and longest-lasting
justifications for black inequality and mortality in the modern urban world.”
Blacks were criminal brutes by nature, and something more than the law of
civilized men was needed to protect the white public. [11] Society must
defend itself from contamination by “the crime-
[11] Without the work of Khalil
Gibran Muhammad, this section
stained blackness of the negro,” asserted Hinton
would not be possible. Rowan Helper, a Southern white-supremacist
Muhammad’s book The
Condemnation of Blackness is a
writer, in 1868. Blacks were “naturally
history of late 19th and 20th intemperate,” one physician claimed in The New
century social scientists,
intellectuals, and reformers
York Medical Journal in 1886, prone to indulging
elevating the problem of “black “every appetite too freely, whether for food,
criminality.” This debate did not
take place on dispassionate,
drink, tobacco, or sensual pleasures, and
objective grounds. Instead the sometimes to such an extent as to appear more of
charge was a weapon wielded to
claim that blacks were not entitled
a brute than human.”
to the same rights as others. When
Frederick Ludwig Hoffman asserts Rape, according to the mythology of the day,
in 1896 that “the criminality of the
remained the crime of choice for blacks. “There is
negro exceeds that of any other
race of any numerical importance something strangely alluring and seductive to
in this country,” he is arguing
[black men] in the appearance of a white
against the franchise for blacks.
Hoffman believed that blacks woman,” asserted Philip Alexander Bruce, a
should be disqualified from the
19th-century secretary of the Virginia Historical
“higher level of citizenship, the first
duty of which is to obey the laws Society. “It moves them to gratify their lust at any
and respect the lives and property
cost and in spite of every obstacle.” These
of others.”Muhammad’s works lets
us see how the psychological and outrages were marked “by a diabolical
rhetorical groundwork was laid for
persistence” that compelled black men to assault
mass incarceration. Another
essential text. white women with a “malignant atrocity of detail
that [has] no reflection in the whole extent of the
natural history of the most bestial and ferocious animals.”
Before Emancipation, enslaved blacks were rarely lynched, because whites
were loath to destroy their own property. But after the Civil War, the number
of lynchings rose, peaked at the turn of the century, then persisted at a high
level until just before the Second World War, not petering out entirely until
the height of the civil-rights movement, in the 1960s. The lethal wave was
justified by a familiar archetype—“the shadow of the Negro criminal,” which,
according to John Rankin, a congressman from Mississippi speaking in 1922,
hung “like the sword of Damocles over the head of every white woman.”
Lynching, though extralegal, found support in the local, state, and national
governments of America. “I led the mob which lynched Nelse Patton, and
I’m proud of it,” declared William Van Amberg Sullivan, a former United
States senator from Mississippi, on September 9, 1908, the day after Patton’s
lynching. “I directed every movement of the mob, and I did everything I
could to see that he was lynched.” Standing before the Senate on March 23,
1900, “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, of South Carolina, declared to his colleagues
that terrorized blacks were the victims not of lynching, but of “their own hot-
headedness.” Lynching was a prudent act of self-defense. “We will not
submit to [the black man’s] gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters
without lynching him,” Tillman said. In 1904, defending southern states’
lack of interest in education funding for blacks, James K. Vardaman, the
governor of Mississippi, offered a simple rationale, as one report noted: “The
strength of [crime] statistics.”
James K. Vardaman, governor of Mississippi,

who said in 1904 that crime statistics
disinclined southern states to invest in
educating African Americans. (Library of
Congress)
Even as African American leaders petitioned the government to stop the
lynching, they conceded that the Vardamans of the world had a point. [12] In
an 1897 lecture, W. E. B. Du Bois declared, “The
[12] Some of the most painful
moments in this research came in
first and greatest step toward the settlement of
looking at the black response to the present friction between the races—
lynching. Mary Church Terrell
claimed that black criminals guilty
commonly called the Negro problem—lies in the
of assault were “ignorant, correction of the immorality, crime, and laziness
repulsive in appearance and as
near the brute creation as it is
among the Negroes themselves, which still
possible for a human being to be.” remains as a heritage from slavery.” Du Bois’
William J. Edwards, a black rural
Alabama school director,
language anticipated the respectability politics of
condemned poor blacks as “often our own era. “There still remain enough well
ferocious or dangerous” and
prone to becoming “a criminal of
authenticated cases of brutal assault on women
the lowest type.” Edwards by black men in America to make every Negro
believed that there were “criminals
in the Negro race for whom no
bow his head in shame,” Du Bois claimed in
legal form of punishment is too 1904. “This crime must at all hazards stop.
severe.” But white supremacists
were not in the habit of sorting
Lynching is awful, and injustice and caste are
good blacks from bad. “Little in hard to bear; but if they are to be successfully
these appraisals of black
criminality by African Americans
attacked they must cease to have even this
would have comforted southern terrible justification.” Kelly Miller, who was then
whites,” writes historian Robert W.
Thurston in his book Lynching,
a leading black intellectual and a professor at
“who of course paid scant Howard University, presaged the call for blacks to
attention to black leaders’ ideas in
the first place.” Thurston’s book
be “twice as good,” asserting in 1899 that it was
led me to all of the primary not enough for “ninety-five out of every hundred
sources cited in this regard.
Negroes” to be lawful. “The ninety-five must
band themselves together to restrain or suppress
the vicious five.”
In this climate of white repression and paralyzed black leadership, the
federal government launched, in 1914, its first war on drugs [13] , passing the
Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which restricted the
[13] When people discuss the drug
war, they are usually referring to
sale of opiates and cocaine. The reasoning was
the one that began in the 1970s, unoriginal. “The use of cocaine by unfortunate
without realizing that this was, at
least, our third drug war in the
women generally and by negroes in certain parts
20th century. I found David F. of the country is simply appalling,” the American
Musto’s The American Disease:
Origins of Narcotic Control to be
Pharmaceutical Association’s Committee on the
extremely helpful on the subject. It Acquirement of the Drug Habit had concluded in
was depressing to see that drug
wars, in this country, are almost
1902. The New York Times published an article by
never launched purely out of a physician saying that the South was threatened
concern for public health. In
almost every instance that Musto
by “cocaine-crazed negroes,” to whom the drug
looks at there is some fear of an had awarded expert marksmanship and an
outsider—blacks and cocaine,
Mexican-Americans and marijuana,
immunity to bullets “large enough to ‘kill any
Chinese-Americans and opium. I game in America.’ ” Another physician, Hamilton
feel compelled to also mention
Kathleen J. Frydl’s book The Drug
Wright, the “father of American narcotic law,”
Wars in America, 1940-1973. It was reported to Congress that cocaine lent
on my list, but unfortunately, I
didn’t get to it. At any rate, I have
“encouragement” to “the humbler ranks of the
great respect for Frydl’s work and negro population in the South.” Should anyone
look forward to reading it in the
future.
doubt the implication of encouragement, Wright
spelled it out: “It has been authoritatively stated
that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the negroes of
the South and other sections of the country.”
The persistent and systematic notion that blacks were especially prone to
crime extended even to the state’s view of black leadership. J. Edgar Hoover,
the head of the FBI for nearly half a century, harassed three generations of
leaders. In 1919, he attacked the black nationalist Marcus Garvey as “the
foremost radical among his race,” then ruthlessly pursued Garvey into jail
and deportation. In 1964, he attacked Martin Luther King Jr. as “the most
notorious liar in the country,” and hounded him, bugging his hotel rooms, his
office, and his home, until his death. Hoover declared the Black Panther
Party to be “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and
authorized a repressive, lethal campaign against its leaders that culminated
in the assassination of Fred Hampton in December of 1969.
Today Hoover is viewed unsympathetically as having stood outside
mainstream ideas of law and order. But Hoover’s pursuit of King was known
to both President Kennedy and President Johnson, King’s ostensible allies.
Moreover, Hoover was operating within an American tradition of
criminalizing black leadership. In its time, the Underground Railroad was
regarded by supporters of slavery as an interstate criminal enterprise devoted
to the theft of property. Harriet Tubman, purloiner of many thousands of
dollars in human bodies, was considered a bandit of the highest order. “I
appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber,” Frederick Douglass
told his audiences. “I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master,
and ran off with them.”
In Douglass’s time, to stand up for black rights was to condone black
criminality. The same was true in King’s time. The same is true today.
Appearing on Meet the Press to discuss the death of Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri, the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—in the
fashion of many others—responded to black critics of law enforcement
exactly as his forebears would have: “How about you reduce crime? … The
white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70 to
75 percent of the time.”
But even in Giuliani’s hometown, the relationship between crime and
policing is not as clear as the mayor would present it. After Giuliani became
mayor, in 1994, his police commissioner William Bratton prioritized a
strategy of “order maintenance” in city policing. As executed by Bratton, this
strategy relied on a policy of stop-and-frisk, whereby police officers could
stop pedestrians on vague premises such as “furtive movements” and then
question them and search them for guns and drugs. Jeffrey Fagan, a
Columbia University law professor, found that blacks and Hispanics were
stopped significantly more often than whites even “after adjusting stop rates
for the precinct crime rates” and “other social and economic factors
predictive of police activity.” Despite Giuliani’s claim that aggressive policing
is justified because blacks are “killing each other,” Fagan found that between
2004 and 2009, officers recovered weapons in less than 1 percent of all stops
—and recovered them more frequently from whites than from blacks. Yet
blacks were 14 percent more likely to be subjected to force. In 2013 the
policy, as carried out under Giuliani’s successor, Michael Bloomberg, was
ruled unconstitutional.
If policing in New York under Giuliani and Bloomberg was crime prevention
tainted by racist presumptions, in other areas of the country ostensible crime
prevention has mutated into little more than open pillage. When the Justice
Department investigated the Ferguson police department in the wake of
Michael Brown’s death, it found a police force that disproportionately
ticketed and arrested blacks and viewed them “less as constituents to be
protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” This was not
because the police department was uniquely evil—it was because Ferguson
was looking to make money. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are
shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” the
report concluded. These findings had been augured by the reporting of The
Washington Post [14] , which had found a few
[14] The reporter for The
Washington Post deserves to be
months earlier that some small, cash-strapped
cited by name—Radley Balko, municipalities in the St. Louis suburbs were
whose writing and reporting on
the problems of modern policing
deriving 40 percent or more of their annual
has greatly improved my own revenue from various fines for traffic violations,
understanding of the issue.
loud music, uncut grass, and wearing “saggy
pants,” among other infractions. This was not
public safety driving policy—it was law enforcement tasked with the job of
municipal plunder.
The job market in America regards black men who

have never been criminals as though they were.
It is patently true that black communities, home to a class of people regularly
discriminated against and impoverished, have long suffered higher crime
rates. The historian David M. Oshinsky notes in his book “Worse Than
Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice that from 1900 to
1930, African Americans in Mississippi “comprised about 67 percent of the
killers in Mississippi and 80 percent of the victims.” As much as African
Americans complained of violence perpetrated by white terrorists, the lack of
legal protection from everyday neighbor-on-neighbor violence was never
then, and has never been, far from their minds. “Law-abiding Negroes point
out that there are criminal and treacherous Negroes who secure immunity
from punishment because they are fawning and submissive toward whites,”
observed the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gunnar Myrdal in his famous
1944 book about race in America, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem
and Modern Democracy. “Such persons are a danger to the Negro community.
Leniency toward Negro defendants in cases involving crimes against other
Negroes is thus actually a form of discrimination.”
Crime within the black community was primarily seen as a black problem,
and became a societal problem mainly when it seemed to threaten the white
population. Take the case of New Orleans between the world wars, when, as
Jeffrey S. Adler, a historian and criminologist at the University of Florida, has
observed, an increase in the proportion of crimes committed by blacks “on
the streets and in local shops and bars,” as opposed to in black homes and
neighborhoods, produced an enduring mix of fear and fury among whites. In
response, Louisiana district attorneys promised that “Negro slayers of
Negroes will be thoroughly prosecuted.” A common tool in homicide cases
was to threaten black suspects with capital punishment to extract a guilty
plea, which mandated a life sentence. So even as violent crime declined
between 1925 and 1940, Louisiana’s incarceration rate increased by more
than 50 percent. “Twice as many inmates entered state correctional facilities
in low-crime 1940 as in high-crime 1925,” Adler writes. At Angola State
Penal Farm, the “white population rose by 39 percent while the African
American inmate population increased by 143 percent.”
The principal source of the intensifying war on crime was white anxiety about
social control. In 1927, the Supreme Court had ruled that a racial-zoning
scheme in the city was unconstitutional. The black population of New
Orleans was growing. And there was increasing pressure from some
government officials to spread New Deal programs to black people. “At no
time in the history of our State,” the city’s district attorney claimed in 1935
[15] , “has White Supremacy been in greater
[15] This account of mass
incarceration in Louisiana is drawn
danger.”
from Jeffrey S. Adler’s article “Less
Crime, More Punishment: The staggering rise in incarceration rates in
Violence, Race, and Criminal
Justice in Early-Twentieth-Century
interwar Louisiana coincided with a sense among
America.” Again, this is a case whites that the old order was under siege. In the
where things we take to be
completely new, are not. One can
coming decades, this phenomenon would be
not help but note the precedent to replicated on a massive, national scale.
cries against “Black on Black
crime” in the district attorney
vowing to crack down on “Negro
V.
slayers of Negroes.”
THE “BADDEST GENERATION ANY SOCIETY HAS
EVER KNOWN”
The American response to crime cannot be divorced from a history of
equating black struggle—individual and collective—with black villainy. And
so it is unsurprising that in the midst of the civil-rights movement, rising
crime was repeatedly linked with black advancement. Elijah Forrester, a
Democratic congressman from Georgia, opposed the Eisenhower
administration’s 1956 civil-rights bill [16] on the
[16] Much of Section V is indebted
to Naomi Murakawa’s The First
grounds that “where segregation has been
Civil Right: How Liberals Built abolished,” black villainy soon prospered. “In the
Prison America. I was not totally
convinced by the subtitle, but
District of Columbia, the public parks have
some of the evidence that become of no utility whatever to the white race,”
Murakawa musters against
Democrats, some of whom are still
Forrester claimed, “for they enter at the risk of
serving, is damning. Should Joe assaults upon their person or the robbery of their
Biden run for president, he has to
be asked about his time spent
personal effects.” Unless segregation was
cheerleading for more prisons. immediately restored, “in 10 years, the nation’s
Some of the quotes Murakawa
unearths—particularly the ones
capital will be unsafe for them in the daytime.”
where Democrats know the bill is Around that time, Basil Whitener, a North
bad, and vote anyway—are little
more than cowardice and put the
Carolina congressman, dismissed the NAACP as
lie to the notion that mass an organization pledged to “the assistance of
incarceration is a well-intentioned
mistake.
Negro criminals.”
In 1966, Richard Nixon picked up the charge,
linking rising crime rates to Martin Luther King’s campaign of civil
disobedience. The decline of law and order “can be traced directly to the
spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right
to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to obey them.” The cure,
as Nixon saw it, was not addressing criminogenic conditions, but locking up
more people. “Doubling the conviction rate in this country would do far more
to cure crime in America than quadrupling the funds for [the] War on
Poverty,” he said in 1968.
As president, Nixon did just that: During his second term, incarceration rates
began their historic rise. Drugs in particular attracted Nixon’s ire. Heroin
dealers were “literally the slave traders of our time,” he said, “traffickers in
living death. They must be hunted to the end of the earth.”
Nixon’s war on crime was more rhetoric than substance. “I was cranking out
that bullshit on Nixon’s crime policy before he was elected,” wrote White
House counsel John Dean [17] , in his memoir of
[17] Citations from John Dean’s
memoir Blind Ambition, John
his time in the administration. “And it was
Ehrlichman’s memoir, Witness to bullshit, too. We knew it.” Indeed, if sinking
Power, and H. R. Haldeman’s
Diaries. I wish I could claim to have
crime rates are the measure of success, Nixon’s
dug these up. I cannot. I first saw war on crime was a dismal failure. The rate of
the John Dean quote in
Perkinson’s Texas Tough and the
every type of violent crime—murder, rape,
Ehrlichman and Haldeman quotes robbery, aggravated assault—was up by the end of
in Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Nixon’s tenure. The true target of Nixon’s war on
crime lay elsewhere. Describing the Nixon
campaign’s strategy for assembling enough votes to win the 1972 election,
Nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman later wrote, “We’ll go after the racists … That
subliminal appeal to the antiblack voter was always in Nixon’s statements
and speeches on schools and housing.” According to H. R. Haldeman,
another Nixon aide, the president believed that when it came to welfare, the
“whole problem [was] really the blacks.” Of course, the civil-rights movement
had made it unacceptable to say this directly. “The key is to devise a system
that recognizes this while not appearing to,” Haldeman wrote in his diary.
But there was no need to devise new systems from scratch: When Nixon
proclaimed drugs “public enemy No. 1,” or declared “war against the
criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our
lives,” he didn’t need to name the threat. A centuries-long legacy of equating
blacks with criminals and moral degenerates did the work for him.
In 1968, while campaigning for president, Nixon was taped rehearsing a
campaign ad. “The heart of the problem is law and order in our schools,” he
said. “Discipline in the classroom is essential if our children are to learn.”
Then, perhaps talking to himself, he added, “Yep, this hits it right on the
nose, the thing about this whole teacher—it’s all about law and order and the
damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there.”
“I was cranking out that bullshit on Nixon’s crime

policy before he was elected. And it was bullshit, too.
We knew it.”
As incarceration rates rose and prison terms became longer, the idea of
rehabilitation was mostly abandoned in favor of incapacitation. Mandatory
minimums—sentences that set a minimum length of punishment for the
convicted—were a bipartisan achievement of the 1980s backed not just by
conservatives such as Strom Thurmond but by liberals such as Ted Kennedy.
Conservatives believed mandatory sentencing would prevent judges from
exercising too much leniency; liberals believed it would prevent racism from
infecting the bench. But reform didn’t just provide sentencing guidelines—it
also cut back on alternatives (parole, for instance) and generally lengthened
time served. Before reform, prisoners typically served 40 to 70 percent of
their sentences. After reform, they served 87 to 100 percent of their
sentences. Moreover, despite what liberals had hoped for, bias was not
eliminated, because discretion now lay with prosecutors, who could
determine the length of a sentence by deciding what crimes to charge
someone with. District attorneys with reelection to consider could
demonstrate their zeal to protect the public with the number of criminals
jailed and the length of their stay.
Prosecutors were not alone in their quest to appear tough on crime. In the
1980s and ’90s, legislators, focusing on the scourge of crack cocaine, vied
with one another to appear toughest. There was no real doubt as to who
would be the target of this newfound toughness. By then, Daniel Patrick
Moynihan had gone from the White House to a U.S. Senate seat in New York.
He was respected as a scholar and renowned for his intellect. But his
preoccupations had not changed. “We cannot ignore the fact that when we
talk about drug abuse in our country, in the main, we are talking about the
consequence it has for young males in inner cities,” he told the Senate in
1986. This might well have been true as a description of drug enforcement
policies, but it was not true of actual drug abuse: Surveys have repeatedly
shown that blacks and whites use drugs at remarkably comparable rates.
Moynihan had by the late Reagan era evidently come to believe the worst
distortions of his own 1965 report. Gone was any talk of root causes; in its
place was something darker. The young inner-city males who had so
concerned Moynihan led “wasted and ruined” lives and constituted a threat
that could “bring about the destruction of whole communities and cities
across this Nation.”
In seeming to abandon scholarship for rhetoric, Moynihan had plenty of
company among social scientists and political pundits. James Q. Wilson, the
noted social scientist and a co-creator of the “broken windows” theory of
policing, retreated to abstract moralizing and tautology. “Drug use is wrong
because it is immoral,” he claimed, “and it is immoral because it enslaves the
mind and destroys the soul.” Others went further. “The inner-city crack
epidemic is now giving birth to the newest horror,” the Washington Post
columnist Charles Krauthammer declaimed: “A bio-underclass, a generation
of physically damaged cocaine babies whose biological inferiority is stamped
at birth.” In this way, “the crime-stained blackness of the Negro” lived on to
haunt white America.
In 1995, Adam Walinsky, a politically liberal lawyer who had been an aide to
Senator Robert F. Kennedy, wrote a cover story for this magazine that,
drawing on Moynihan’s 1965 report, predicted doom. American policy
toward the black family had, Walinsky wrote, “assured the creation of more
very violent young men than any reasonable society can tolerate, and their
numbers will grow inexorably for every one of the next twenty years.” The
solutions Walinsky proposed included ending racism, building better schools,
and hiring more police. But the thrust of his rhetoric was martial. “We shrink
in fear of teenage thugs on every street,” he wrote. “More important, we
shrink even from contemplating the forceful collective action we know is
required.”
Even as The Atlantic published those words, violent crime had begun to
plunge. But thought leaders were slow to catch up. In 1996, William J.
Bennett, John P. Walters, and John J. DiIulio Jr. partnered to publish perhaps
the most infamous tract of the tough-on-crime era, Body Count: Moral Poverty
… and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs. The authors
(wrongly) predicted a new crime wave driven by “inner-city children” who
were growing up “almost completely unmoralized and develop[ing] character
traits” that would “lead them into a life of illiteracy, illicit drugs, and violent
crimes.” The threat to America from what the authors called “super-
predators” was existential. “As high as America’s body count is today, a rising
tide of youth crime and violence is about to lift it even higher,” the authors
warned. “A new generation of street criminals is upon us—the youngest,
biggest, and baddest generation any society has ever known.” Incarceration
was “a solution,” DiIulio wrote in The New York Times, “and a highly cost-
effective one.” The country agreed. For the next decade, incarceration rates
shot up even further. The justification for resorting to incarceration was the
same in 1996 as it was in 1896.
“No one can say I’m soft on crime.” In 1994, Bill Clinton signed a bill that offered grants to states that
built prisons and cut back on parole, driving up the nation’s incarceration numbers. He now says he
regrets doing that. (Doug Mills/AP)
Many African Americans concurred that crime was a problem. When Jesse
Jackson confessed, in 1993, “There is nothing more painful to me at this
stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start
thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel
relieved,” he was speaking to the very real fear of violent crime that dogs
black communities. The argument that high crime is the predictable result of
a series of oppressive racist policies does not render the victims of those
policies bulletproof. Likewise, noting that fear of crime is well grounded does
not make that fear a solid foundation for public policy.
The suite of drug laws adopted in the 1980s and ’90s did little to reduce
crime, but a lot to normalize prison in black communities. “No single offense
type has more directly contributed to contemporary racial disparities in
imprisonment than drug crimes,” Devah Pager, the Harvard sociologist, has
written.
Between 1983 and 1997, the number of African Americans
admitted to prison for drug offenses increased more than twenty-
six-fold, relative to a sevenfold increase for whites … By 2001,
there were more than twice as many African Americans as whites
in state prison for drug offenses.
In 2013, the ACLU published a report noting a 10-year uptick in marijuana
arrests. The uptick was largely explained as “a result of the increase in the
arrest rates of Blacks.” To reiterate an important point: Surveys have
concluded that blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates. And
yet by the close of the 20th century, prison was a more common experience
for young black men than college graduation or military service.
By the mid-’90s, both political parties had come to endorse arrest and
incarceration as a primary tool of crime-fighting. This conclusion was
reached not warily, but lustily. As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton flew
home to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a
mentally disabled, partially lobotomized black man who had murdered two
people in 1981. “No one can say I’m soft on crime,” Clinton would say later.
Joe Biden, then the junior senator from Delaware, quickly became the point
man for showing that Democrats would not go soft on criminals. “One of my
objectives, quite frankly,” he said, “is to lock Willie Horton up in jail.” Biden
cast Democrats as the true party without mercy. “Let me define the liberal
wing of the Democratic Party,” he said in 1994. “The liberal wing of the
Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties … The liberal wing of the
Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties … The liberal wing of the
Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic
Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.”
In Texas, the Democratic governor, Ann Richards, had come to power in
1991 advocating rehabilitation, but she ended up following the national
trend, curtailing the latitude of judges and the parole board in favor of fixed
sentencing, which gave power to prosecutors. In 1993, Texas rejected a bid
to infuse its schools with $750 million—but approved $1 billion to build more
prisons. By the end of her term, Richards had presided over “one of the
biggest public works projects in Texas history,” according to Robert
Perkinson’s Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. In New York,
another liberal governor, Mario Cuomo, found himself facing an exploding
prison population. After voters rejected funding for more prisons, Cuomo
pulled the money from the Urban Development Corporation, an agency that
was supposed to build public housing for the poor. It did—in prison. Under
the avowedly liberal Cuomo, New York added more prison beds than under
all his predecessors combined.
This was penal welfarism at its finest. Deindustrialization had presented an
employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races.
Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks.
Mass incarceration “widened the income gap between white and black
Americans,” writes Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of
Michigan, “because the infrastructure of the carceral state was located
disproportionately in all-white rural communities.” Some 600,000 inmates
are released from America’s prisons each year, more than the entire
population of America’s prisons in 1970—enough people, according to Pager,
to “fill every one of the fast-food job openings created annually nearly five
times over.”
Dark predictions of rising crime did not bear out. Like the bestial blacks of the
19th century, super-predators proved to be the stuff of myth. This realization
cannot be regarded strictly as a matter of hindsight. As the historian Naomi
Murakawa has shown in her book, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built
Prison America, many Democrats knew exactly what they were doing—
playing on fear for political gain—and did it anyway. Voting on the Anti–Drug
Abuse Act of 1986, Nick Rahall II, a congressman from West Virginia,
admitted that he had reservations about mandatory minimums but asked,
“How can you get caught voting against them?” Congresswoman Patricia
Schroeder of Colorado accused her colleagues of using the 1986 bill to score
points before an election. In the end, she voted for it. “Right now, you could
put an amendment through to hang, draw, and quarter,” said Claude Pepper,
a historically liberal congressman from Florida, referring to the same law.
Pepper also voted for it.
In 1994, President Clinton signed a new crime bill, which offered grants to
states that built prisons and cut back on parole. Clinton recently said that he
regrets his pivotal role in driving up the country’s incarceration numbers. “I
signed a bill that made the problem worse,” he told the NAACP in July. “And
I want to admit it.” In justifying his actions of 20 years earlier, he pointed to
the problems of “gang warfare” and of “innocent bystanders” shot down in
the streets. Those were, and are, real problems. But even in trying to explain
his policies, Clinton neglected to retract the assumption underlying them—
that incarcerating large swaths of one population was a purely well-intended,
logical, and nonracist response to crime. Even at the time of its passage,
Democrats—much like the Republican Nixon a quarter century earlier—knew
that the 1994 crime bill was actually about something more than that.
Writing about the bill in 1993, Clinton’s aides Bruce Reed and Jose Cerda III
urged the president to seize the issue “at a time when public concern about
crime is the highest it has been since Richard Nixon stole the issue from the
Democrats in 1968.”
VI.
“IT’S LIKE I’M IN PRISON WITH HIM.”
On the evening of December 19, 1973, Odell Newton, who was then 16
years old, stepped into a cab in Baltimore with a friend, rode half a block,
then shot and killed the driver, Edward Mintz. The State of Maryland charged
Odell with crimes including murder in the first degree and sentenced him to
life in prison. He has now spent 41 years behind bars, but by all accounts he is
a man reformed. He has repeatedly expressed remorse for his crimes. He has
not committed an infraction in 36 years.
The Maryland Parole Commission has recommended Odell for release three
times since 1992. But in Maryland, all release recommendations for lifers are
subject to the governor’s approval. In the 1970s, when Odell committed his
crime, this was largely a formality. But in our era of penal cruelty, Maryland
has effectively abolished parole for lifers—even juvenile offenders such as
Odell. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that life sentences without the
possibility of parole for juveniles found guilty of crimes other than homicide
were unconstitutional. Two years later, it held the same for mandatory life
sentences without parole for juvenile homicide offenders. But the Court has
yet to rule on whether that more recent decision was retroactive. Fifteen
percent of Maryland’s lifers committed their crimes as juveniles—the largest
percentage in the nation, according to a 2015 report by the Maryland
Restorative Justice Initiative and the state’s ACLU affiliate. The vast majority
of them—84 percent—are black.
This summer, I visited Odell’s mother, Clara; his sister Jackie; and his brother
Tim at Clara’s home in a suburb of Baltimore. Clara had just driven seven
hours round-trip to visit Odell at Eastern Correctional Institution, on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland, and she was full of worry. He was being treated
for hepatitis. He’d lost 50 pounds. He had sores around his eyes.
Odell Newton’s mother, Clara, with Odell’s sister-in-law Lavenia, his brother Tim, and his sister Jackie
at Clara’s home in Maryland. (Greg Kahn)
I asked Clara how they managed to visit Odell regularly. She explained that
family members trade visits. “It takes a lot out of the family,” she explained.
“Then you come back home, [after] you’ve seen him up there like that, [and]
you’re crying. I got so bad one time, I was losing weight … Just thinking, Was
it gonna be all right? Was it gonna kill him? Was he gonna die?”
In framed photographs, Odell. (Greg Kahn)
Clara was born and raised in Westmoreland, Virginia. She had her first child,
Jackie, when she was only 15. The next year she married Jackie’s father, John
Irvin Newton Sr. They moved to Baltimore so that John could pursue a job at a
bakery. “We stuck it out and made things work,” Clara told me. They were
married for 53 years, until John passed away, in 2008.
Odell Newton was born in 1957. When he was 4 years old, he fell ill and
almost died. The family took him to the hospital. Doctors put a hole in his
throat to help him breathe. They transferred Odell to another hospital, where
he was diagnosed with lead poisoning. It turned out that he had been putting
his mouth on the windowsill.
“We didn’t sue nobody. We didn’t know nothing about that,” Clara told me.
“And when we finally found out that you could sue, Odell was 15. And they
said they couldn’t do anything, because we waited too long.”
In prison, Odell has repeatedly attempted to gain his G.E.D., failing the test
several times. “My previous grade school teacher noted that I should be
placed in special education,” Odell wrote in a 2014 letter to his lawyer. “It is
unclear what roll childhood lead poisoning played in my analytical
capabilities.”
In June of 1964, the family moved into a nicer house, in Edmondson Village.
Sometime around ninth grade, Clara began to suspect that Odell was lagging
behind the other kids in his class. “We didn’t find out that he was really
delayed until he was almost ready to enter into high school,” Jackie told me.
“They just passed him on and passed him on.” Around this time, Clara says,
Odell got “mixed up with the wrong crowd.” Not until he wrote his first letter
home from prison did Clara understand the depth of his intellectual
disability. The letter read as though it had been written by “a child just
starting pre-K or kindergarten,” Clara told me. “He couldn’t really spell. And,
I don’t know, it just didn’t look like a person of his age should be writing like
that.”
Odell Newton is now 57. He has spent the lion’s share of his life doing time
under state supervision. The time he’s served has not affected him alone. If
men and women like Odell are cast deep within the barrens of the Gray
Wastes, their families are held in a kind of orbit, on the outskirts, by the
relentless gravity of the carceral state. For starters, the family must contend
with the financial expense of having a loved one incarcerated. Odell’s parents
took out a second mortgage to pay for their son’s lawyers, and then a third.
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.
There’s the expense of phone calls, and of constantly restocking an inmate’s
commissary. Taken together, these economic factors fray many a family’s
bonds.
And then there is the emotional weight, a mix of anger and sadness. While I
was in Detroit last winter, I interviewed Patricia Lowe, whose son Edward
Span had been incarcerated at age 16, sentenced to nine and a half to 15
years for carjacking, among other offenses. When I met with Patricia, Edward
was about three years into his sentence, and she was as worried for him as she
was angry at him. He’d recently begun calling home and requesting large
sums of money. She was afraid he was being extorted by other prisoners. At
the same time, she was unhappy about carrying the burden Edward had
placed on her after all the hard work she’d put in as a mother. “He never ate
school lunch. I would get up in the morning and make subs, sandwiches,
salads, spaghetti, fried chicken,” she said. “We had dysfunction, but what
family don’t? There’s no excuse for his misbehavior. So whatever you did out
there, you can’t do in here. You know what it’s about. I told you out here
what’s going to happen in there. So you gave me heartache out here. You
can’t give it to me in there.”
But the heartache was unavoidable. “It’s like I’m in prison with him. I feel
like I’m doing every day of that nine-and-a-half to 15.” When he was 17,
Edward was taken from juvenile detention and put in an adult prison. Even in
juvenile, Edward couldn’t sleep at night. “He feared going to prison,” Patricia
told me. “He calls home and tells me he’s okay. But I know different because
he has a female friend he calls. He can’t sleep. He’s worried about his safety.”
 0:00 / 5:32   
Odell Newton was 16 when he killed a cab driver. Four decades later, his family is still hoping for
his release.
Odell’s brother Tim graduated from Salisbury State College with a degree in
sociology in 1982. Two years later, he took a job with the State of Maryland
as a corrections officer. For 20 years, while one son, Odell, served time under
the state, another son, Tim, worked for it. This gave Tim a front-row seat for
observing how Maryland’s carceral system grew more punitive. Whereas
inmates had once done their time and gone to pre-release facilities, now they
were staying longer. Requirements for release became more onerous.
Meanwhile, the prisons were filling to capacity and beyond. “They just kept
overcrowding and overcrowding and not letting people go home,” Tim told
me. The prisons began holding two people in cells meant for one. “If you’re in
an 8-by-10 space that’s only big enough for one person and now you got two
people in there, it’s just more aggravation,” Tim said. “And then they cut out
a lot of the college programs that they did have. They cut out the weights
being in the yard.”
The overcrowding, the stripping of programs and resources, were part of the
national movement toward punishing inmates more harshly and for longer
periods. Officially, Maryland has two kinds of life sentences—life with the
possibility of parole, and life without. In the 1970s, Maryland’s governor
paroled 92 lifers. Parole for lifers declined after Marvin Mandel’s last term
ended, in 1979, and then ground to a halt in 1993, when Rodney Stokes—a
lifer out on work release—killed his girlfriend and then himself. Parris
Glendening, the Democratic governor elected in 1994, declared, “A life
sentence means life.” Glendening’s Republican successor, Robert L. Ehrlich
Jr., commuted five lifers’ sentences and granted only a single instance of
medical parole.
In 2006, Martin O’Malley (who’s currently vying to be the Democrats’
nominee for president in 2016) defeated Ehrlich to become governor, but he
took an even stricter stance on lifers than his predecessor, failing to act on
even a single recommendation of the Parole Commission. Recognizing that
the system had broken down, the Maryland legislature changed the law in
2011 so that the commission’s recommendations would automatically be
carried out if the governor did not reject them within 180 days. This changed
almost nothing. After the law’s passage, O’Malley vetoed nearly every
recommendation that reached his desk.
This is not sound policy for fighting crime or protecting citizens. In Maryland,
the average lifer who has been recommended for but not granted release is
60 years old. These men and women are past the age of “criminal
menopause,” as some put it, and most pose no threat to their community.
Even so, the Maryland Parole Commission’s recommendation is not easily
attained: Between 2006 and 2014, it recommended only about 80 out of
more than 2,100 eligible lifers for release. Almost none of those 80 or so men
and women, despite meeting a stringent set of requirements, was granted
release by the governor. Though Maryland’s Parole Commission still offers
recommendations for lifers, they are disregarded. The choice given to judges
to levy sentences for life either with or without parole no longer has any
meaning.
For more than five years, from February 1988 to June 1993, Odell Newton
worked in the community through work release; for part of that period, he
was able to visit his relatives through the state’s family-leave policy. Reports
from Odell’s former work-release employers are glowing. “His character is
above reproach,” one wrote in 1991. Another said: “I consider it a privilege
to have Mr. Newton as an employee, and would rehire Odell at any time.”
With his family, he would often go out to eat, or have a cookout or a party.
Family leave was supposed to be a bridge to Odell’s eventual release. But the
program was suspended for lifers in May of 1993, after a convicted murderer
fled while visiting his son. The Stokes killing followed just weeks later. After
that, parole was effectively taken off the table for all lifers, and Maryland
ended work release for them as well. Believing for years that Odell was on his
way to coming home, and then seeing the road to freedom snatched away,
frustrated the family. “I could see you doing it to people that’s starting out
new, and this is a new law you’re putting down,” his sister Jackie told me. But
this is “like me buying a house and I have it one price, then when you come in
and sign the papers, they’re going, ‘Oh no, I changed my mind, I want
$10,000 more for it.’ ”
I asked Odell’s family how they coped with the experience. “You just have to
pray and keep praying,” his mother told me.
For most of Odell’s time in prison, the power to sign the papers has rested in
the hands of Democrats, who in recent decades have taken a line on lifers at
least as harsh as any Republican has. “The Glendening administration’s
policies, and Gov. Martin O’Malley policies made a paroleable life sentence a
‘non paroleable sentence,’ ” Odell wrote to his lawyer, “and that’s not right.”
Patricia Lowe and her son Uriah sit on the bed of Patricia’s other son Edward, who has been
incarcerated since he was 16. Edward is currently serving the fourth year of a 9.5-to-15-year sentence.
August 8, 2015. (Greg Kahn)
VII.
“OUR VALUE SYSTEM BECAME SURVIVING VERSUS LIVING.”
Born in the late 1950s, Odell Newton was part of the generation that so
troubled Moynihan when he wrote his report on “The Negro Family.” But
Odell had the very bulwark that Moynihan treasured—a stable family—and it
did not save him from incarceration. It would be wrong to conclude from this
that family is irrelevant. But families don’t exist independent of their
environment. Odell was born in the midst of an era of government-backed
housing discrimination. Indeed, Baltimore was a pioneer in this practice—in
1910, the city council had zoned the city by race. “Blacks should be
quarantined in isolated slums,” J. Barry Mahool, Baltimore’s mayor, said.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such explicit racial-zoning schemes
unconstitutional, in 1917, the city turned to other means—restrictive
covenants, civic associations, and redlining—to keep blacks isolated [18] .
[18] I first saw this in Richard These efforts curtailed the ability of black people

Rothstein’s excellent report “From
to buy better housing, to move to better
Ferguson to Baltimore: The Fruits
of Government-Sponsored neighborhoods, and to build wealth. Also, by
Segregation.” Rothstein is brilliant

confining black people to the same
and has the kind of fine
understanding of the machinery of neighborhoods, these efforts ensured that people
government policy as it relates to
who were discriminated against, and hence had
housing that I deeply envy. You
can see that on display here in this little, tended to be neighbors only with others
conversation with Terry Gross.
who also had little. Thus while an individual in
that community might be high-achieving, even
high-earning, his or her ability to increase that achievement and wealth and
social capital, through friendship, marriage, or neighborhood organizations,
would always be limited. [19] Finally, racial
[19] A lot of this section depends
on the ever-insightful Robert
zoning condemned black people to the oldest and
Sampson, and more broadly the worst housing in the city—the kind where one was
focus on neighborhood dynamics
in contemporary sociology. The
more likely to be exposed, as Odell Newton was,
notion of compounded to lead. A lawyer who handled more than 4,000
deprivation, which Rob discusses
here, really elucidates the difficulty
lead-poisoning cases across three decades
in making easy comparisons recently described his client list to The
between blacks and whites. And
so talking about a white middle
Washington Post: “Nearly 99.9 percent of my
class and a black middle class as clients were black.”
though they are socio-economic
equals, or as though the only
That families are better off the stronger and more
difference is having to give their
children “The Talk” really misses stable they are is self-evidently important. But so
that these two groups live in
is the notion that no family can ever be made
different worlds. Specifically, the
world of the black middle class is impregnable, that families are social structures
—because of policy—significantly
existing within larger social structures.
poorer. Thus to wonder about the
difference in outcomes between
the black and white middle class, Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard who
is really to wonder about the
focuses on crime and urban life, notes that in
difference in weight between
humans living on the Earth and America’s ghettos, “like things tend to go
humans living on the moon.
together.” High rates of incarceration, single-
parent households, dropping out of school, and
poverty are not unrelated vectors. Instead, taken together, they constitute
what Sampson calls “compounded deprivation”—entire families, entire
neighborhoods, deprived in myriad ways, must navigate, all at once, a tangle
of interrelated and reinforcing perils.
Black people face this tangle of perils at its densest. In a recent study,
Sampson and a co-author looked at two types of deprivation—being
individually poor, and living in a poor neighborhood. Unsurprisingly, they
found that blacks tend to be individually poor and to live in poor
neighborhoods. But even blacks who are not themselves individually poor are
more likely to live in poor neighborhoods than whites and Latinos who are
individually poor. For black people, escaping poverty does not mean escaping
a poor neighborhood. And blacks are much more likely than all other groups
to fall into compounded deprivation later in life [20] , even if they managed to
avoid it when they were young.
[20] Taken from a forthcoming
paper by Sampson and Kristin L.
“It’s not just being poor; it’s discrimination in the
Perkins, “Compounded
Deprivation in the Transition to housing market, it’s subprime loans, it’s drug
Adulthood: The Intersection of
addiction—and then all of that following you over
Racial and Economic Inequality
among Chicagoans, 1995-2013,” in time,” Sampson told me recently. “We try to split
the Russell Sage Foundation
things out and say, ‘Well, you can be poor but still
Journal of the Social Sciences.
have these other characteristics and qualities.’
It’s the myth of the American Dream that with initiative and industriousness,
an individual can always escape impoverished circumstances. But what the
data show is that you have these multiple assaults on life chances that make
transcending those circumstances difficult and at times nearly impossible.”
On a brisk Thursday morning last December, I climbed into an SUV with Carl
S. Taylor and Yusef Bunchy Shakur and drove to the West Side of Detroit,
where both men had grown up. Shakur is a community activist and the author
of two books chronicling his road to prison, his experience inside, and his
return to society. Taylor is a sociologist at Michigan State University, where
he researches urban communities and violence and serves as an adviser to
Michigan’s prisons and juvenile detention centers. A 24-year age gap
separates Taylor and Shakur, a gap that’s reflected in their visions of Detroit.
Shakur, who is 42, recalls a town ravaged by deindustrialization, where
unemployment was rampant, social institutions had failed, and gangs had
taken their place. “The community collapsed,” Shakur said. “Our value
system became surviving versus living. Drugs, gangs, lack of education all
came to the forefront. And prison and incarceration.”
After serving time in prison, Yusef Bunchy Shakur became a community activist in Detroit.
Photographed at his mother’s home on the West Side of Detroit. August 8, 2015. (Greg Kahn)
Taylor, who is 66, recalls a more hopeful community where black
professionals lived next door to black factory workers and black maids and
black gangsters, and the streets were packed with bars, factories, and
restaurants. “All of this was filled,” Taylor said, pointing out the car window
at a row of abandoned housing. “Everybody was working. It was smaller
factories all up and down. But the strip was here also. The legendary Chit
Chat Lounge was down here, where the Motown and jazz musicians played.”
We stopped on the desolate corner of Hazelwood and 12th Street. “I lived in
that first house right there that’s boarded up,” Taylor said. He pointed out at
the street, gesturing toward businesses and neighbors long gone. “Right here
was a drugstore and produce. There was a black woman right here that owned
a drapery-cleaning business. Negroes used to have draperies! Here was the
wig shop and the beauty salon for the street girls. Church ladies weren’t going
in there. I lived right here, and this is a very powerful place for me.” In black
cities around the country, Jim Crow—with its housing segregation and job
discrimination—imposed boundaries. And within those boundaries an order
took root. This world was the product of oppression—but it was a world
beloved by the people who lived there. It is a matter of some irony that the
time period and the communities Taylor was describing with fond nostalgia
are the same ones that so alarmed Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965. Taylor
was not blind to the problems—many of them outlined in Moynihan’s report—
but he described them as embedded within a larger social fabric, giving them
a kind of humanity that Moynihan’s alarmism stripped away.
“This was the good time, the good life,” Taylor said. “And when the riot hit,
this is where it jumped off.”
Like so many urban riots during the long, hot summers of the 1960s,
Detroit’s began with law enforcement. On July 23, 1967, the Detroit police
raided an after-hours watering hole on the West Side. For several days, the
city’s black communities burned. As in other cities, the riot demarcated the
end of “the good life.” In fact the good life, to the extent it ever existed, had
begun decaying long before. As Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at New York
University, observes in his book The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and
Inequality in Postwar Detroit, “Between 1947 and 1963, Detroit lost 134,000
manufacturing jobs, while its population of working-aged men and women
actually increased.” From the end of the 1940s to the beginning of the
1960s, Detroit suffered four major recessions. Automakers began moving to
other parts of the country, and eventually to other parts of the world. The loss
of jobs meant a loss of buying power, affecting drugstores, grocery stores,
restaurants, and department stores. [21] “By the
[21] One of my great irritants is
how so much of our discussions
late 1950s,” Sugrue writes, Detroit’s “industrial
on race and racism proceed from landscape had become almost unrecognizable.”
the notion that American history
begins in the 1960s. The
Black residents of Detroit had to cope not just
discussions around Detroit is the
obvious example. There is a with the same structural problems as white
popular narrative which holds that
Detroit was a glorious city and the
residents but also with pervasive racism. Within a
riots ruined it. Thomas J. Sugrue’s precarious economy, black people generally
The Origins Of the Urban Crisis
worked the lowest-paying jobs. They came home
does a great job at dialing back
this idea and pointing to the long from those jobs to the city’s poorest
arc of the city’s decline.
neighborhoods, where most of them used their
substandard wages to pay inflated prices for
inferior housing. Attempts to escape into white neighborhoods were
frustrated by restrictive covenants, racist real-estate agents, block
associations, and residents whose tactics included, as Sugrue writes,
“harassment, mass demonstrations, picketing, effigy burning, window
breaking, arson, vandalism, and physical attacks.” Some blacks were richer
than others. Some were better educated than others. But all were constricted,
not by a tangle of pathologies, but by a tangle of structural perils.
Peril is generational for black people in America—and

incarceration is our mechanism for maintaining that
peril.
The fires of 1967 conveniently obscured those perils. But the structural
problems, along with the wave of deindustrialization, were what gifted
America with the modern “Negro problem.” By the 1970s, the government
institution charged with mediating these problems was, in the main, the
criminal-justice system. As we drove around Detroit, Shakur described the
world in which the black men he knew came of age in the 1970s and ’80s.
Out of every 10 men, “probably seven of their fathers have been in prison.
Possibly two of their mothers have been killed. The majority of their fathers
and mothers haven’t graduated from high school.” Shakur sounded a lot like
Moynihan—except he understood that the family was interacting with
something larger. “When you grow up and you seen nothing but drugs, you
seen nothing but prostitution, that becomes normal,” he said. “So when you
talk about Carl”—Taylor, who went to college and graduate school and
became a professor—“Carl becomes abnormal, because he’s so far from my
world. I’ve never talked with a doctor until he be sewing me up after I got
shot. I never talked with a lawyer until he was sending me to prison. I never
talked with a judge until he convicted me.”
The blacks incarcerated in this country are not like the majority of Americans.
They do not merely hail from poor communities—they hail from communities
that have been imperiled across both the deep and immediate past, and
continue to be imperiled today. Peril is generational for black people in
America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the
peril continues. Incarceration pushes you out of the job market. Incarceration
disqualifies you from feeding your family with food stamps. Incarceration
allows for housing discrimination based on a criminal-background check.
Incarceration increases your risk of homelessness. Incarceration increases
your chances of being incarcerated again. “The prison boom helps us
understand how racial inequality in America was sustained, despite great
optimism for the social progress of African Americans,” Bruce Western, the
Harvard sociologist, writes. “The prison boom is not the main cause of
inequality between blacks and whites in America, but it did foreclose upward
mobility and deflate hopes for racial equality.”
“This was the good time, the good life,” says Carl S. Taylor, a sociologist at Michigan State University,
talking about 1960s Detriot before riots and mass incarceration eviscerated the black community.
August 8, 2015. (Greg Kahn)
If generational peril is the pit in which all black people are born, incarceration
is the trapdoor closing overhead. “African Americans in our data are distinct
from both Latinos and whites,” Robert Sampson told me. “Even when we
control for marital status and family history of criminality, we still see these
strong differences. The compounded deprivation that African Americans
experience is a challenge even independent of all the characteristics we think
are protective.”
Characteristics such as the one Daniel Patrick Moynihan focused on—family.
VIII.
“THE NEGRO POOR HAVING BECOME MORE OPENLY VIOLENT”
Moynihan is in the midst of a renaissance. Fifty years after the publication of
“The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” a coterie of sociologists,
historians, and writers are declaring it prophecy. In their version of history, a
courageous and blameless Moynihan made one mistake: He told the truth.
For his sins—loving the black family enough to be honest—Moynihan was
crucified by an intolerant cabal of obstinate leftists and Black Power
demagogues. “Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist,” the
columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times this past spring. In
the eyes of his new acolytes, Moynihan has been vindicated by the rising
percentage of female-headed households and the intractable problems of
America’s inner cities. Intimidated by “the vitriolic attacks and acrimonious
debate” over the black family, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson has put
it, liberal scholars steered clear of the controversy. Conservatives stepped
into the breach, eagerly taking up Moynihan’s charge to examine the family,
but stripping it of any structural context, and dooming the dream of a
benevolent welfare state.
A raft of sociological research has indeed borne out Moynihan’s skepticism
about black progress, as well as his warnings about the kind of concentrated
poverty that flowed from segregation. Moynihan’s observation about the
insufficiency of civil-rights legislation has been proved largely correct. [22]
Moreover, Moynihan’s concern about the
[22] This seems like the right place
to thank Peter-Christian Aigner,
declining rates of two-parent households would
who is working on a biography of have struck the average black resident of Harlem
Moynihan. While Peter doesn’t yet
have a book for me to cite, his
in 1965 as well placed. Nationalist leaders like
insights on Moynihan were crucial Malcolm X drew much of their appeal through
in guiding me to sources and
thinking about the context for “The
their calls for shoring up the black family.
Negro Family: The Case for
National Action.”
The Other Half of the Moynihan Report
But if Moynihan’s past critics exhibited an ignorance of his oeuvre and his
intent, his current defenders exhibit a naïveté in defense of their hero. “The
Negro Family” is a flawed work in part because it is a fundamentally sexist
document that promotes the importance not just of family but of patriarchy,
arguing that black men should be empowered at the expense of black women.
“Men must have jobs,” Moynihan wrote to President Johnson in 1965. “We
must not rest until every able-bodied Negro male is working. Even if we have
to displace some females.” Moynihan was evidently unconcerned that he
might be arguing for propping up an order in which women were bound to
men by a paycheck [23] , in which “family” still
[23] More on this count: In 1967,
Time magazine put Moynihan on
meant the right of a husband to rape his wife and
the cover, dubbing him an intramarital violence was still treated as a purely
“urbanologist.” Discussing what
he’d do about the problem among
domestic and nonlegal matter.
blacks in cities, Moynihan said,
“When these Negro G.I.s come Moynihan’s defenders also overlook his record
back from Viet Nam, I would meet
after he entered the Nixon White House in 1969.
them with a real estate agent, a
girl who looks like Diahann Carroll, Perhaps still smarting from his treatment in the
and a list of jobs. I’d try to get half
of them into the grade schools,
Johnson administration, Moynihan fed Nixon’s
teaching kids who’ve never had antipathies—against elites, college students, and
anyone but women telling them
blacks—and stoked the president’s fears about
what to do.” Everything about this
quote is wrong. crime. In a memo to Nixon, he asserted that “a
great deal of the crime” in the black community
was really a manifestation of anti-white racism: “Hatred—revenge—against
whites is now an acceptable excuse for doing what might have been done
anyway.” Like his forebears who’d criminalized blacks, Moynihan claimed
that education had done little to mollify the hatred. “It would be difficult to
overestimate the degree to which young well educated blacks detest white
America.”
Whereas Johnson, guided by Moynihan, had declared that “white America
must accept responsibility” for the problems of the black community,
Moynihan wrote Nixon that “the Negro lower class would appear to be
unusually self-damaging.” He continued:
The Negro poor having become more openly violent—especially in
the form of the rioting of the mid 1960’s—they have given the
black middle class an incomparable weapon with which to threaten
white America. This has been for many an altogether intoxicating
experience. “Do this or the cities will burn.” … What building
contracts and police graft were to the 19th-century urban Irish, the
welfare department, Head Start, and Black Studies programs will
be to the coming generation of Negroes. They are of course very
wise in this respect.
In this same memo [24] , Moynihan ominously
[24] Nicholas Lemann quotes this
deeply unfortunate memo in his
cited a “rather pronounced revival—in
book The Promised Land: The impeccably respectable circles—of the
Great Migration and How It
Changed America.
proposition that there is a difference in genetic
potential” between the two races. Moynihan
claimed that he did not believe in a genetic difference in intelligence, but said
he considered the matter “an open question.”
Crime really did begin to rise during the early 1970s. But by this point,
Moynihan had changed. According to the Moynihan of the Nixon era,
middle-class blacks were not hardworking Americans attempting to get
ahead—they were mobsters demanding protection money in exchange for the
safety of America’s cities. And the “unusually self-damaging” black poor
were hapless tools, the knife at the throat of blameless white America. In
casting African Americans as beyond the purview of polite and civilized
society, in referring to them as a race of criminals, Moynihan joined the long
tradition of black criminalization. In so doing, he undermined his own stated
aims in writing “The Negro Family” in the first place. One does not build a
safety net for a race of predators. One builds a cage.
Whatever the slings and arrows Moynihan suffered in the 1960s, his vision
dominates liberal political discourse today. One hears Moynihan in Barack
Obama’s cultural critique of black fathers and black families. Strains of
Moynihan’s thinking ran through Bill Clinton’s presidency. “We cannot …
repair the American community and restore the American family until we
provide the structure, the values, the discipline, and the reward that work
gives,” President Clinton told a group of black church leaders in Memphis in
1993. He argued for a policy initiative on three fronts—jobs, family, and
crime—but the country’s commitment to each of these propositions proved
unequal. Incarceration soared during Clinton’s two terms. There’s very little
evidence that it brought down crime—and abundant evidence that it hindered
employment for black men, and accelerated the kind of family breakdown
that Clinton and Moynihan both lamented. In their efforts to strengthen the
black family, Clinton and Moynihan—and Obama, too—aspired to combine
government social programs with cultural critiques of ghetto pathology (the
“both/and” notion, as Obama has termed it), and they believed that
Americans were capable of taking in critiques of black culture and white
racism at once. But this underestimated the weight of the country’s history.
“It would be difficult to overestimate the degree to

which young well educated blacks detest white
America.” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Richard
Nixon, 1970
For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm. Enslavement lasted
for nearly 250 years. The 150 years that followed have encompassed debt
peonage, convict lease-labor, and mass incarceration—a period that
overlapped with Jim Crow. This provides a telling geographic comparison.
Under Jim Crow, blacks in the South lived in a police state. Rates of
incarceration were not that high—they didn’t need to be, because state social
control of blacks was nearly total. Then, as African Americans migrated
north, a police state grew up around them there, too. In the cities of the
North, “European immigrants’ struggle” for the credential of whiteness gave
them the motive to oppress blacks, writes Christopher Muller, a sociologist at
Columbia who studies incarceration: “A central way European immigrants
advanced politically in the years preceding the first Great Migration was by
securing patronage positions in municipal services such as law enforcement.”
By 1900, the black incarceration rate in the North was about 600 per
100,000—slightly lower than the national incarceration rate today.
That early-20th-century rates of black imprisonment were lower in the South
than in the North reveals how the carceral state functions as a system of
control. Jim Crow applied the control in the South. Mass incarceration did it
in the North. After the civil-rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and
toppled Jim Crow laws, the South adopted the tactics of the North, and its
rates of imprisonment surged far past the North’s. Mass incarceration
became the national model of social control. Indeed, while the Gray Wastes
have expanded their population, their most significant characteristic remains
unchanged: In 1900, the black-white incarceration disparity in the North
was seven to one [25] —roughly the same disparity
[25] The historical numbers on
mass incarceration come from
that exists today on a national scale.
Christopher Muller’s 2012 article,
“Northward Migration and the IX.
Rise of Racial Disparity in
American Incarceration, 1880–
1950.” “NOW COMES THE PROPOSITION THAT THE
NEGRO IS ENTITLED TO DAMAGES.”
In his inaugural year as the governor of Texas, 1995, George W. Bush
presided over a government that opened a new prison nearly every week.
Under Bush, the state’s prison budget rose from $1.4 billion to $2.4 billion,
and the total number of prison beds went from about 118,000 to more than
166,000. Almost a decade later Bush, by then the president of the United
States, decided that he, and the rest of the country, had made a mistake.
“This year, some 600,000 inmates will be released from prison back into
society,” Bush said during his 2004 State of the Union address. “We know
from long experience that if they can’t find work, or a home, or help, they are
much more likely to commit crime and return to prison.”
As we enter the 2016 presidential-election cycle, candidates on both sides of
the partisan divide are echoing Bush’s call. From the Democratic Socialist
Bernie Sanders (“To my mind, it makes eminently more sense to invest in
jobs and education, rather than jails and incarceration”) to mainstream
progressives like Hillary Clinton (“Without the mass incarceration that we
currently practice, millions fewer people would be living in poverty”) to right-
wing Tea Party candidates like Ted Cruz (“Harsh mandatory minimum
sentences for nonviolent drug crimes have contributed to prison
overpopulation and are both unfair and ineffective”), there is now broad
agreement that the sprawling carceral state must be dismantled. Longtime
criminal-justice-reform activists who struggled through the tough-on-crime
’90s are heartened to see the likes of Koch Industries, a conglomerate owned
by patrons of the libertarian right, teaming up with the Center for American
Progress, a liberal think tank, in service of decarceration.
But the task is Herculean. The changes needed to achieve an incarceration
rate in line with the rest of the developed world are staggering. In 1972, the
U.S. incarceration rate was 161 per 100,000—slightly higher than the
English and Welsh incarceration rate today (148 per 100,000). To return to
that 1972 level, America would have to cut its prison and jail population by
some 80 percent. The popular notion that this can largely be accomplished by
releasing nonviolent drug offenders is false—as of 2012, 54 percent of all
inmates in state prisons had been sentenced for violent offenses. The myth is
that “we have a lot of people in prison and a bunch of good guys, and we can
easily see the difference between the good guys and the bad guys,” says
Marie Gottschalk, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and
the author of the recent book Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of
American Politics. Her point is that it’s often hard to tell a nonviolent offender
from a violent offender. Is a marijuana dealer who brandishes a switchblade a
violent criminal? How about the getaway driver in an armed robbery? And
what if someone now serving time for a minor drug offense has a prior
conviction for aggravated assault? One 2004 study found that the proportion
of “unambiguously low-level drug offenders” could be less than 6 percent in
state prisons and less than 2 percent in federal ones.
One does not build a safety net for a race of predators.

One builds a cage.
Decarceration raises a difficult question: What do we mean by violent crime,
and how should it be punished? And what is the moral logic that allows
forever banishing the Odell Newtons of America to the Gray Wastes? At the
moment, that moral logic, as evidenced by the frequency with which the
United States locks up people for life, remains peculiarly American. Some 50
out of every 100,000 Americans are serving a life sentence—which is,
Gottschalk notes, a rate “comparable to the incarceration rate for all
prisoners, including pretrial detainees, in Sweden and other Scandinavian
countries.” If one purpose of prison is to protect the public, then high rates of
life imprisonment make little sense, because offenders, including those
convicted of violent crimes, tend to age out of crime. Arguing for leniency
toward violent criminals is not easy politically. In many European countries, a
10-year sentence even for a violent crime would seem harsh to citizens, but
Gottschalk observes that the fact that American prisons are filled with “lifers
and de facto lifers who will likely die in prison” makes the typical European
sentence seem lenient to American politicians and their constituents. Thus
the initial impediment to undoing mass incarceration in America is not that
we don’t have the answers for how to treat violent crime—it’s that our politics
seem allergic to the very question.
The Gray Wastes are a moral abomination for reasons beyond the sheer
number of their tenants. In 1970 the national correctional system was much
smaller than it is today, but even so, blacks were incarcerated at several times
the rate of whites. There is no reason to assume that a smaller correctional
system inevitably means a more equitable correctional system. Examining
Minnesota’s system, Richard S. Frase, a professor of criminal law at the
University of Minnesota, found a state whose relatively sane justice policies
give it one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country—and yet whose
economic disparities give it one of the worst black-white incarceration ratios
in the country. Changing criminal-justice policy did very little to change the
fact that blacks committed crimes at a higher rate than whites in Minnesota.
Why did blacks in Minnesota commit crimes at a higher rate than whites?
Because the state’s broad racial gulf in criminal offending mirrored another
depressing gulf. “The black family poverty rate in Minnesota was over six
times higher than the white poverty rate, whereas for the United States as a
whole the black poverty rate was 3.4 times higher,” Frase writes. [26]
[26] Frase published his findings in The lesson of Minnesota is that the chasm in

his 2009 research paper, “What
incarceration rates is deeply tied to the
Explains Persistent Racial
Disproportionality in Minnesota’s socioeconomic chasm between black and white
Prison and Jail Populations?” I first
America. The two are self-reinforcing—
encountered this article in Marie
Gottschalk’s book Caught. impoverished black people are more likely to end
up in prison, and that experience breeds
impoverishment. An array of laws, differing across the country but all
emanating from our tendency toward punitive criminal justice—limiting or
banning food stamps for drug felons; prohibiting ex-offenders from obtaining
public housing—ensure this. So does the rampant discrimination against ex-
offenders and black men in general. This, too, is self-reinforcing. The
American population most discriminated against is also its most incarcerated
—and the incarceration of so many African Americans, the mark of
criminality, justifies everything they endure after.
Mass incarceration is, ultimately, a problem of troublesome entanglements.
To war seriously against the disparity in unfreedom requires a war against a
disparity in resources. And to war against a disparity in resources is to
confront a history in which both the plunder and the mass incarceration of
blacks are accepted commonplaces. Our current debate over criminal-justice
reform pretends that it is possible to disentangle ourselves without
significantly disturbing the other aspects of our lives, that one can extract the
thread of mass incarceration from the larger tapestry of racist American
policy.
Moynihan’s 1964 Memo to Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz
Daniel Patrick Moynihan knew better. His 1965 report on “The Negro
Family” was explosive for what it claimed about black mothers and black
fathers—but if it had contained all of Moynihan’s thinking on the subject,
including his policy recommendations, it likely would have been politically
nuclear. “Now comes the proposition that the Negro is entitled to damages as
to unequal favored treatment—in order to compensate for past unequal
treatment of an opposite kind,” Moynihan wrote in 1964 [27] . His point was
simple if impolitic: Blacks were suffering from the
[27] Moynihan’s thoughts on effects of centuries of ill treatment at the hands of

“unequal treatment” can be found white society. Ending that ill treatment would not
in this April 20, 1964, outline of a
memo to Labor Secretary W. be enough; the country would have to make
Willard Wirtz. amends for it. “It may be that without unequal
treatment in the immediate future there is no way
for [African Americans] to achieve anything like equal status in the long run,”
Moynihan wrote.
As we look ahead to what politicians are now saying will be the end of mass
incarceration, we are confronted with the reality of what Moynihan observed
in 1965, intensified and compounded by the past 50 years of the carceral
state. What of the “damages” wrought by mass incarceration? What of the
black men whose wages remained stagnant for decades largely due to our
correctional policy? What of the 20th-century wars on drugs repeatedly
pursued on racist grounds, and their devastating effects on black
communities? The post-civil-rights consensus aims for the termination of
injury. Remedy is beyond our field of vision. When old wounds fester,
quackery is prescribed and hoary old fears and insidious old concepts burble
to the surface—“matriarchy”; “super-predators”; “bio-underclass.” This, too,
was part of Moynihan, but it wasn’t all of him.
To return to its 1972 incarceration rate, America

would have to cut its prison and jail population by
some 80 percent.
A serious reformation of our carceral policy—one seeking a smaller prison
population, and a prison population that looks more like America—cannot
concern itself merely with sentencing reform, cannot pretend as though the
past 50 years of criminal-justice policy did not do real damage. And so it is
not possible to truly reform our justice system without reforming the
institutional structures, the communities, and the politics that surround it.
Robert Sampson argues for “affirmative action for neighborhoods”—reform
that would target investment in both persistently poor neighborhoods and the
poor individuals living in those neighborhoods. One class of people suffers
deprivation at levels above and beyond the rest of the country—the same
group that so disproportionately fills our jails and prisons. To pull too
energetically on one thread is to tug at the entire tapestry.
Moynihan may have left any recommendations as to “favored treatment” for
blacks out of his report. But the question has not disappeared. In fact, it is
more urgent than ever. The economic and political marginalization of black
people virtually ensured that they would be the ones who would bear the
weight of what one of President Nixon’s own aides called his “bullshit” crime
policy, and thus be fed into the maw of the Gray Wastes. And should crime
rates rise again, there is no reason to believe that black people, black
communities, black families will not be fed into the great maw again. Indeed,
the experience of mass incarceration, the warehousing and deprivation of
whole swaths of our country, the transformation of that deprivation into
wealth transmitted through government jobs and private investment, the
pursuit of the War on Drugs on nakedly racist grounds, have only intensified
the ancient American dilemma’s white-hot core—the problem of “past
unequal treatment,” the difficulty of “damages,” the question of reparations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TA-NEHISI COATES is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about

culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle and
Between the World and Me.
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Coates-The Black Family in The Age of Mass Incarceration

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11/23/2015 50 Years After the Moynihan Report, Examining the Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The

Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic

The Black Family in the Age of Mass

I. “Lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”

“LOWER-CLASS BEHAVIOR IN OUR CITIES IS SHAKING THEM APART.”

More from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s October cover story

The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition

The Other Half of the Moynihan Report

[2] In the quest to understand the must accept responsibility,” Johnson said. Family

The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent

time together in the White House.

“WE ARE INCARCERATING TOO FEW CRIMINALS.”

incarceration and how it affected

From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s

“YOU DON’T TAKE A SHOWER AFTER 9 O’CLOCK.”

[7] Devah Pager’s book Marked Just as ex-offenders had to learn to acculturate

[8] From Craig Haney’s book

“THE CRIME-STAINED BLACKNESS OF THE NEGRO”

[10] Taken from Cotton Is King, and To fortify the “republican edifice,” acts

has taken some criticism for

“Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a U.S. senator from

James K. Vardaman, governor of Mississippi,

The job market in America regards black men who

THE “BADDEST GENERATION ANY SOCIETY HAS

“I was cranking out that bullshit on Nixon’s crime

“IT’S LIKE I’M IN PRISON WITH HIM.”

In framed photographs, Odell. (Greg Kahn)

“OUR VALUE SYSTEM BECAME SURVIVING VERSUS LIVING.”

[18] I first saw this in Richard These efforts curtailed the ability of black people

Segregation.” Rothstein is brilliant

Peril is generational for black people in America—and

“THE NEGRO POOR HAVING BECOME MORE OPENLY VIOLENT”

The Other Half of the Moynihan Report

“It would be difficult to overestimate the degree to

One does not build a safety net for a race of predators.

[26] Frase published his findings in The lesson of Minnesota is that the chasm in

Moynihan’s 1964 Memo to Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz

[27] Moynihan’s thoughts on effects of centuries of ill treatment at the hands of

To return to its 1972 incarceration rate, America

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TA-NEHISI COATES is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about

 Twitter  previous next story 

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