Cycles of Poverty and Crime in America's Inner Cities

Lewis D. Solomon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351523806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite the best hopes of the past half century, black urban pathologies persist in America. The inner cities remain concentrations of the uneducated, unemployed, underemployed, and unemployable. Many fail to stay in school and others choose lives of drugs, violence, and crime. Most do not marry, leading to single-parent households and children without a father figure. The cycle repeats itself generation after generation.

It is easy to argue that nothing works, given the policy failures of the past. For Lewis D. Solomon, fatalism is not acceptable. A complex and interrelated web of issues plague inner-city black males: joblessness; the failure of public education; crime, mass incarceration, and drugs; the collapse of married, two-parent families; and negative cultural messages. Rather than abandon the black urban underclass, Solomon presents strategies and programs to rebuild lives and revitalize America's inner cities. These approaches are neither government oriented nor dependent on federal intervention, and they are not futuristic.

Focusing on rehabilitative efforts, Solomon describes workforce development, prisoner reentry, and the role of nonprofit organizations. Solomon's strategies focus on the need to improve the quality of America's workforce through building human capital at the socioeconomic bottom. The goal is to enable more people to fend for themselves, thereby weaning them from dependency on public sector handouts. Solomon shows a path forward for inner-city black males.

1

The Abyss in America’s Inner Cities

In America’s inner city neighborhoods, crime, poverty, unemployment, unwed motherhood, and teen pregnancy rates are sky-high. Poorly educated in dreadful schools, the black male underclass is ever more disconnected from mainstream society. In inner cities, finishing high school is often the exception for black males, legal employment is scarce, and incarceration has become routine.¹ Endemic crime and the drug culture create formidable problems as do children who are raised in single-mother households where limited resources and parenting skills create barriers to success.

This chapter provides a brief survey of the abyss in America’s inner cities, focusing on four dimensions: unemployment and underemployment, high school dropouts, mass incarceration, and unwed motherhood and teen pregnancy. Black males, in particular, are not employed, being educated, or trained in a meaningful manner. Together with class- and race-bound childrearing practices, the web of disadvantages has become deeply entrenched in America’s urban neighborhoods filled with seemingly permanent, concentrated pathologies. Despite a multitude of efforts by the federal government for nearly five decades, the cycle continues to repeat itself, generation after generation.

Unemployment and Underemployment

The United States faces a stubbornly high unemployment rate hovering between 8 and 9 percent. Along with the unemployment, there are millions more of underemployed individuals, who work part-time but would like to work full-time, and those who have stopped looking for jobs, so-called discouraged workers, who would take jobs if available. In total, perhaps 19.4 percent or some thirty million Americans were seeking a job in March 2011.² In particular, long-term unemployment, that is, an inability to find a job after being out of work for six months or more, a devastating personal experience, suppresses the earnings of those impacted, destroys marriages and families, and devastates communities.

The unemployment rate of blacks is substantially higher than the rate for whites. In the second quarter of 2010, for example, the unemployment rate for black males ages twenty and above was twice as high as the unemployment rate for white males of the same age. This category of black males had an unemployment rate of 17.3 percent, while the unemployment rate for similar white males equaled 8.6 percent.³ Unemployment reached nearly 16 (15.6) percent for African-Americans generally and a mind-boggling 40 percent for black males between ages sixteen and twenty-four, who were not in school.⁴

With limited, near-term prospects for meaningful, stable employment, some African-American men turn to the illegal drug trade. As a result, whole neighborhoods are engulfed and endangered by the violence among drug-dealing gangs for control of drug distribution areas. In addition to drug trafficking, black males out of the labor force survive off of relatives, girl friends, and petty crime. They cannot save for the future, and do not marry the women they get pregnant or support children they father. Their subculture glorifies swagger over work and education.

High School Dropouts

Black males are more likely than white males to drop out of high school and thus not graduate. In 2008, for example, black males were nearly twice as likely to drop out of high school as white males. In the aggregate, 9 percent of black males dropped out of high school compared with 5 percent of white males.⁵ In many inner cities across the nation, nearly one-half of all blacks do not finish high school by age nineteen,⁶ a stunning statistic, with few attaining their high school diplomas past their normal graduation dates. Even among those who graduate high school, only 42 percent of black males graduated on time, i.e., by their normal graduation dates, in 2006 versus 71 percent of white males.⁷ In the nation’s largest, high-poverty urban districts perhaps as few as one-third of all students graduate, with the completion rates among certain disadvantaged groups often still lower.⁸

Dropping out of high school has important negative consequences contributing to a multitude of social problems, particularly increased criminal activity resulting in imprisonment and a higher likelihood of unemployment. As young males, especially young black males, drop out of America’s educational system, they are more likely to be embedded in criminal networks that restrict their work opportunities, thereby further increasing their criminal involvement. As a result, they are more likely to drop into the nation’s criminal justice system. On any given day, according to some estimates, about one in ten young male high school dropouts is incarcerated compared with one in thirty-five young male high school graduates. The situation is much bleaker for blacks with nearly one in four (some 23 percent) young African-American male dropouts incarcerated, whether in jails, prisons, or juvenile detention centers, on an average day.⁹ Others paint an even more hopeless picture. According to one expert, among sixteen- to twenty-four-year-old black males not enrolled in school, about one in three is enmeshed in the criminal justice system, either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole; less than one-half have jobs.¹⁰ One study put the 2008 unemployment rate for young African-American high school dropouts, ages sixteen to twenty-four, at 69 percent, compared with 54 percent for non-Hispanic white dropouts and 32 percent for all high school graduates of the same age.¹¹

Among the at-risk youth (ages sixteen to twenty-four) and adults, who are neither employed nor attending school, the global economy has little to offer. Idleness fills their days. For younger ex-offenders, who have dropped out of high school, returning to school is generally unappealing. They would likely be older than their classmates; many public high schools are not anxious for them to return and resume their education. These disconnected males are likely to engage in delinquent behavior or illegal activities to earn money. Criminality often flourishes among these disconnected black males, who participate in the sale of illegal drugs.

The illegal drug trade provides not only a livelihood to the poorly educated and hard-to-employ young black males but also an alternative social order, one valuing toughness, and entrepreneurship. The profits generated by drug dealing make it the most lucrative endeavor for many. Drug dealers, the most financially successful people in many inner city areas, have turned the accepted, mainstream social order upside down.

One noted sociologist documented the dominance of the criminal element in America’s inner city neighborhoods. Drug dealers, with their displays of money and power, socialize the young in those areas. By the fourth grade, he estimated, “about three-quarters young students have bought into the code of the street or the oppositional culture”¹² where it is better to be respected, if not feared, rather than loved.

Mass Incarceration

Black males, especially high school dropouts, face mass incarceration or are under the watchful eye of the probation or parole system that marginalizes them from mainstream economic and social life in the United States. Amazingly, estimates indicate that some 29 to 37 percent of adult black males are current or ex-felons.¹³ With African-American males, including both high school graduates and dropouts, having a one-in-three chance being incarcerated at some point in their lives¹⁴—a chilling statistic—a major public policy problem exists.

At the start of 2008, the American penal system—prisons and jails—held more than 2.3 million adults, with one in one hundred U.S. adults behind bars.¹⁵ (Prisons house those serving sentences of one year or more; jails house those awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than one year.) At that time, out of 1.6 million (1,610,446) prisoners incarcerated in federal and state prisons, some 592,000 (591,000) were black.¹⁶

The change in criminal justice policy propelled the penal system growth with its adverse impact on black males. Over the decades, the War on Drugs, which President Ronald Reagan announced in October 1982,¹⁷ has resulted in a huge increase in the U.S. prison population, with much of the extraordinary growth in incarceration resulting from the huge rise in the prosecution and imprisonment for drug offenses. From 1980 to 1997, for example, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by 1,100 percent.¹⁸ By the late 1990s, nearly 60 percent of all federal prisoners were drug offenders.¹⁹

Although whites and black likely use illegal drugs with the same frequency, blacks are more likely to be involved in the highly lucrative, but dangerous, business of drug marketing and distribution.²⁰ The drug trade is violent. No peaceful means exists to resolve disputes over turf, customers, and prices. Rather, adversaries resolve such conflicts with guns and violence. Thus, the drug trade serves users while destroying inner city neighborhoods and devastating the African-American community. The police typically target these areas where drug dealing is visible and thus easier to make arrests.

Largely because of the War on Drugs, the incarceration rates for black males are astonishing. One in thirty American men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four is locked up; for black males in that age group, one in nine is imprisoned.²¹ Overall, the rate of black incarceration is eight times that of whites,²² with many black men locked away for drug-related crimes.

Imprisonment serves as a rite of passage for many black male high school dropouts. Historically, among black men without high school diplomas, who were born between 1965 and 1969, nearly 60 percent had been in prison by 1999 before they reached age thirty-five.²³ The incarceration rate for black male high school dropouts is more than fifty times the national average for all offenders, with some 60 to 70 percent of that group of blacks born since the mid-1960s spending part of their lives behind bars.²⁴ Among black male high school dropouts ages twenty to thirty-five, on any given day, more were in custody—34 percent—than were working at paid employment—30 percent—in the middle of the last decade of the twentieth century.²⁵ In short, “serving time in prison [for black male dropouts]…has become a routine life event on the pathway through adulthood.”²⁶

Widespread incarceration results in a number of negative consequences for those with criminal convictions who are unable to find stable jobs to support themselves and their families. Doing time is stigmatizing, often for life. Employers are less likely to hire ex-offenders than comparable job applicants. One study found that employers were much more reluctant to hire applicants with conviction histories than any other group of disadvantaged workers. Only about 20 (21) percent of employers surveyed would definitely or probably hire ex-offenders, compared to 93 percent for former or current welfare recipients, 66 percent for those with spotty employment histories, and 80 percent for individuals unemployed for one year or more.²⁷ In short, the formerly incarcerated represent the least desirable job applicants in the labor market pool, at least from an employer’s viewpoint.

A conviction signals employers that an individual may be unreliable, untrustworthy, and even dangerous. Employers bear the burden of workplace theft and violence. They fear legal liabi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Abyss in America’s Inner Cities
• 2. Current Federal Rehabilitative Workforce Development and Prisoner Reentry Policies and Programs: An Overview
• 3. Near-Term Strategies, Programs, and Policies: Nonprofit Approaches to Rehabilitate the Disconnected and the Formerly Incarcerated
• 4. Intermediate-Term Preventive Strategies, Programs, and Policies to Facilitate Skills Training in High Schools and Alternative Venues
• 5. Conclusion: The Need to Rethink Three Policies
• Index