One in 100 is Bad, One in Nine is a National Tragedy

For at least a day or two, the news that 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars has genuinely startled people. Students brought it up in my classes during the week. Friends who aren’t normally criminal justice watchers mentioned it in passing during casual phone conversations. For at least a millisecond—or until the news cycle rotates again on its axis—we are pausing to reflect on the possibility that something isn’t right if so many of us are locked away, 2.3 million adults at last count, more in fact than any other country in the world. (China is second with 1.5 million people, Russia a distant third with
890,000 inmates).

But embedded within this same incarceration study by the Pew Center on the States there are other numbers. For instance, for Hispanic men over the age of 18, that lock-up ratio drops to 1 in 36. For Black men over the age of 18, it’s 1 in 15.

But here’s the figure that ought to stop your breath: Among African American men ages 20 to 34, the number behind bars? One in Nine.

That statistic, my friends, does not suggest a nationwide problem, it points to a national tragedy.

Think about it for a minute: Better yet, look at all the young men around you of whatever race and ethnicity. Think of the young guy who bags your groceries or gets you a diet coke at the McDonald’s drive-thru, the cute grad school kid who works at Starbucks or Trader Joe’s, your smart young neighbor with the pretty wife the two and four-year-old kids, your nephews, your cousins, your brothers, your sons….and all of their friends. Now imagine that, in a terrible instant, one in nine of those young men are gone. Pouf! Disappeared.

That’s what’s going on in African American communities. For real.

Okay, let’s take it further. Imagine that those one in nine disappeared young men were suddenly in the hospital in intensive care. OMG, now we have a public health problem of catastrophic proportions on our hands, right? If that happened, we would clamor for every resource in the country to be mobilized toward solving the crisis, and rightly so.

Well, now let’s give our collective thought experiment one more small twist. Just for argument’s sake, imagine that this same one in nine had a volitional part in their hospitalization. Let’s say that, for some inexplicable reason they all threw themselves off second and third story roofs, and broke legs, backs, arms, necks and ankles. What then? I suspect we’d realize instantly that we were in the middle of the worst mental health disaster the nation had ever seen, and would start testing frantically for toxic chemicals in the drinking water.

What we would NOT do, what we would never dreaming of doing, is to lay the entirety of the responsibility and the blame on the roof-leaping, hospitalized guys. We would understand that with those kind of numbers, something had to be going terribly wrong in and around those young men if so many of them were willing to do themselves such damage.

But make that figure one in nine Black men, and put those young men in prison….and the rest of us do little more than look up vaguely and yawn. Pity, we say. But I’m sure they wouldn’t be there if they didn’t deserve it. Perhaps it’s the fault of the welfare system… A breakdown in their family values. And then we look away, as if we have no real part in the problem or the solution.

Look, there are no easy answers.

We need prison diversion programs, we need a ton more rehabilitation programs within the prisons, we need reentry programs when the inmates get out—and well over 90 percent of our nation’s inmates will get out—we need better schools, more mentoring programs (college tuition fees in trade for national service in the form of mentoring?), tax incentives for employers who hire at risk young men, and so on and so on. There’s a laundry list. This is a massive public health crisis and needs to be treated as such.

The one-in-nine ratio is a national wound that does grievous harm to all of us. Anyone who doesn’t think so is unclear on the concept and is advised to exit their imaginary bubble immediately.

Oh, yeah, and those pesky little stats-–1 in 100 and 1 in 9—need to be front and center on the agenda when we talk to presidential candidates. Instead we natter on about NAFTA, and Louis Farrakhan, for God’s sake. (Yes, NAFTA’s a problem, but let’s get proportional.)

By the way, while we’re on the subject of “nine,” In the state of California, nearly nine out of every 100 tax dollars spent in the state are spent locking up Californians. (As we face a $16 billion budget shortfall, isn’t it nice to know that last year we spent $8.8 billion on our prisons?)

Okay, enough ranting. It’s Saturday night and time for a glass of wine, a nice dinner, good conversation, and an evening’s escape from such reality-based thoughts.

Then tomorrow, I’ll answer some of those letters I get every month from guys in prison.