Urban Injustice

Reading Guide

Introduction (1-4)

• What is Hilfiker’s main idea here? (1)
• What do you think of his credentials? (2)
• Define what Hilfiker means by "the surround". (3)
• Why did Hilfiker's political stance change over the years? (3)

Chapter One: "On Building the Ghetto": A History (5-13)

Overall Questions: 

• How did the Urban Ghetto take shape from the 1880's to the 1950's?
• Despite the fact that segregation has existed throughout American history, the truly abysmal 'modern ghetto' emerged only during the last fifty years. (After the Civil Rights Movement!) Why? What happened?

What were the “effects” of the following “causes”?

BLUEPRINT FOR THE GHETTO  

(1877-1900)

End of Reconstruction: (5)  
With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, sharecropping, disenfranchisement, lynchings, legal segregation, and the first of a host of Jim Crow laws ultimately left African-Americans with none of the rights of citizenship.

Northern Industrialization (5)
A slow trickle of black families starts to move north where they could find factory work inrapidly industrializing cities, but they faced considerable discrimination, especially in employment. Their wages were lower than whites, their chances for advancement were poor, and they were rarely allowed to join unions, but blacks lived in close proximity to whites in 'walking cities'. The 'push' of oppression in the South combined with the 'pull' of factory work began a historic transformation of the American city.

The influx of millions of European immigrants in late 19th c. America created a patchwork of different ethnic communities in cities like Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. Since public transportation was virtually nonexistent then and since most new immigrants could not afford to move away from the places where they worked, the different ethnic enclaves where culture and language were familiar tended to cluster around the factories and sweatshops. Black "immigrants" from the Deep South followed the same pattern. 

Many different nationalities initially co-existed in the same inner city neighborhoods. As factory workers became more affluent, they or their children moved out of factory neighberhoods and dispersed into the general population.Blacks, though, were forced to remain in the inner city..

Pre-WWI Discrimination (6)
By the early 1900s, however, the character of the African-American clusters in the North began to change. Blacks faced increasing discrimination in housing and public accommodations. Resistance to integration hardened. Continuing union opposition to black members and employer reluctance to train blacks as skilled workers in factories kept African Americans in jobs that were "heavy, hot, dirty and low-paying."

WWI (6)
In spite of discrimination, a Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South began with the outbreak of World War I. The war effort caused a spike in the demand for factory workers in the North. During the 1920s, between 1.5 and 2 million African Americans moved north; an additional 400,000 would follow during the 1930s. These migrants crowded into the inner city neighborhoods which became increasingly African-American.

Depression (6)
When the economy collapsed in 1929, African-American workers were the first to be let go from jobs and the hardest hit. As the economy gradually picked up during the later thirties, white workers were the first rehired, leaving disproportionate numbers of African Americans on relief or in federal work camps.

New Deal (6)
To make matters worse, African Americans were largely excluded from the most important of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs to alleviate poverty. Social Security and mandatory unemployment insurance, for example, both specifically excluded domestic and agricultural workers. 

FHA Policy 1934-1960s (7)
During the waning years of the Depression and again after World War II, Federal Housing Authority guarantees not only allowed families to become homeowners (and thus build equity), but these loans also created local jobs and provided investment in the community. Between 1934, when the FHA was founded, and 1969, the percentage of white families who owned their own homes increased from 44 percent to 64 percent. Citing concerns that poorer black neighborhoods were not good financial risks, however, the FHA "redlined" almost all African-American communities, refusing to guarantee mortgages there. Private lenders followed suit. After World War II, the Veterans Administration used the same redlining policies to ensure that returning African-American servicemen were excluded from the massive aid offered to GI's to help them buy mortgages and establish homes in the suburbs. Policies excluding African Americans from government aid lasted well into the 1960s.

Second Migration (7)
Between 1940 and 1960, a staggering 4.5 million blacks left the South during the second Great Migration to northern cities. Because of segregation, however, the geographic area of the already established black ghettos in these cities expanded only slowly, leaving new immigrants few options for housing. Overcrowding forced rental prices up in the poorest sections of cities. Landlords subdivided houses into multiple apartments, degrading the housing stock, and overcharged rent due to the huge African-American demand for housing.

Zoning Laws (7)
Cities increasingly turned to zoning laes in an effort to separate residential neighborhoods from industrial areas. When zoning choices had to be made among neighborhoods, black communities usually lost out, tending to be zoned as "industrial," a label that often prohibited not only the construction of new residential construction but even the improvement of old residential buildings.

As a result, population density in the black ghetto increased steadily. By 1950, the average "isolation index" in northern ghettos was almost 90 percent, meaning that, on average, African Americans lived in neighborhoods that were 90 percent black, a level of segregation never experienced before by any European ethnic group in the United States.

IMPOVERISHING THE GHETTO

"Vertically integrated” ghettos (7)
Despite over crowding, northern black ghettos grew into viable, productive communities during the first half of the twentieth century. Poverty created its share of social problems (the average income of African-American families then was only slightly more than half that of white families). These neighborhoods were segregated racially, but they were "vertically integrated." Affluent, middle-class, working-class, and poor families all lived in relatively close proximity in the same neighborhoods. Social organization was intact. Informal networks kept neighbors in touch with one another, while businesses, schools, churches, fraternal organizations, and volunteer organizations supported the heaalth of communities. Most people held jobs. Single-parent families were a distinct minority. Levels of violence were low. Education was valued.  

1950-2000

Urban Renewal (8)
Federal Urban Renewal frequently involved the wholesale destruction of black neighborhoods.Urban renewal projects were initially intended to revive decaying inner-city neighborhoods by transforming them into new, architecturally interesting cultural, commercial, and residential centers, but black neighborhoods were often the chosen sites for 'slum removal'. 

Public Housing Projects (8)
The federal government provided money for the construction of new public housing for residents displaced by highways and urban renewal projects. In a catastrophically bad decision, Congress set strict income limits on who could live in these new housing projects. Functionally, this meant that the poorest members of black neighborhoods were removed  from their neighborhoods to strange parts of the city and then segregated by class as well as by race, only intensifying their isolation from the larger society.

Interstate Highway System (8)
The Interstate Highway program instituted in 1956 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower repeated the process. As a network of superhighways meant to link the country together was blasted through cities, poor black areas were, not surprisingly, the first choices for disruption.  Highways (like Route 40 in West Baltimore and the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York) were routed through black communities. Either an area would be razed and its former inhabitants removed, or a highway would be used to create a physical boundary between the black ghetto and other areas of the city, further isolating its inhabitants.

The federally subsidized highway programs also facilitated the suburbanization of the North, contributing to the erosion of its cities. Increasingly affluent whites were eager to leave those cities, and the government subsidized this exodus by building roads that made daily access to urban workplaces from the suburbs far more feasible. FHA and Veterans Administration mortgage guarantees were awarded for new housing in new neighborhoods but were denied to black or mixed urban neighborhoods. The effects of this "white flight" were drastic, not only concentrating the population of poor African Americans in center cities, but also drawing jobs away from those same areas, especially jobs that paid a living wage.

Foreign Competition (9)
Over the last four decades, however, major global economic changes have drastically reduced America's economic advantages. After the destruction caused by World War II, the Europeans and Japanese gradually rebuilt their manufacturing sectors, and by the 1970s they had begun to compete, often quite successfully, with American companies. In the later 1980s and 1990s, less developed countries like Korea and Taiwan expanded their manufacturing as well. By the turn of the millennium, American manufacturing was competing not only with the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut but also the former Eastern European nations, Indonesia, Mexico, and Latin America.

Industrial Relocation to South & Suburbia (9)
Within the United States, changes in technology and transportation eliminated the need to locate factories in the middle of cities, so industry, too, joined the exodus to the suburbs. Rural areas in the North and the cities and suburbs in the Southwest proved increasingly attractive to industry because land was cheaper, taxes lower, and unions far weaker.

Globalization (9)
More recently, the development of large, trans-national corporations able to create "global assembly lines" has led to further loss of manufacturing in the United States. American corporation have moved factoriues to the Third World where wages are drastically lower, unions nonexistent, environmental regulations few, and expensive workplace rules to protect workers from injury are seldom on the books, much less enforced.

Information Economy (9)
With the increasing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing worldwide, moreover, many of the better-paying jobs that remain in the United States require higher levels of education. For now, there is still a demand for workers who analyze data, write computer programs, manage people, administer organizations, or do financial planning. But tese jobs are only available to people with a college degree or higher.

Service Sector Pay Scales (9)
Increasingly, however, the bulk of jobs remaining for poorly trained or educated Americans now exist only in the service sector-- as domestics, janitors, clerks, salespeople, nursing aides, or cashiers-- where wages have historically been low and benefits poor or nonexistent. To make matters worse, over the last thirty years, wages in the service sector have declined in real dollars relative to other sectors of the economy, so even full-time workers in such jobs now find it difficult to stay out of poverty. Inner city blacks also face difficult transportation challenges commuting from the center city to the suburbs.

Civil Rights Movement (10)
The success of the Civil Rights movement in bringing the end of legal segregation contributed to the devastation of the inner citiy neighborhoods. African Americans could for the first time demand housing outside the crowded ghetto. So, beginning in the late 1950s, affluent African Americans joined the white exodus from the city to the suburbs. Only those who could not afford to move out were left.

THE MYTH OF THE WAR ON POVERTY

The 1960's

1960s Poverty Awareness (11)
In 1962, at the height of the post-WWII economic boom in America, political activist Michael Harrington published The Other America, a book that pointed to "invisible" poverty in the United States He described an economic underworld comprising nearly one-fifth of the population. Harrington focused graphically on the poverty of white rural areas such as the Appalachia, but he looked at other groups, too: the uninsured elderly, migrant farm workers, and residents of the black ghettos in the inner cities of the North.

In 1964, during his first months in office after the assassination of President Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson felt the need for a grand theme to characterize his presidency, a program that would offer him legitimacy in a position he had only inherited and also garner the support of the liberals who mistrusted LBJ as a prototypical southern politician. Influenced by Harrington's book, Johnson declared a "war on poverty" as part of an ambitious attempt to complete the social revolution of the New Deal.

Civil Rights Movement (11)
Johnson intended to focus the War on Poverty on white rural poverty, but as the Civil Rights movement gathered steam and the nation became increasingly aware of inner-city poverty, the spotlight shifted to the urban ghetto

Vietnam (11)
As the war heated up in 1965, Johnson's energies focused increasingly on Vietnam. Disagreements about the conduct of the war divided the liberal coalition which had supported the reforms of his domestic agenda. Most decisive, money funneled to Vietnam could not be used to fight American poverty. Few of Johnson's poverty programs were ever fully implemented, and funding, never abundant, was curtailed or eliminated for almost all of them.

Riots (12)
It was precisely then that the ghettos erupted in violence. The concentration of poverty and the isolation of the poor within American cities now created overwhelming pressures and frustrations amid all the promises of help and hope. Beginning in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965, one city after another boiled over. Television pictures of National Guardsmen occupying the smoldering ruins of the inner city would by 1968 become a dominant image of the black ghetto. 

Moynihan Report (12)
In 1964, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a young advisor to President Johnson. wrote what was supposed to be a confidential memo to the president. Although the report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, stressed male unemployment as the primary cause of black poverty, Moynihan also described what he called a "tangle of pathology" that had undermined the black family, another way of describing what Harrington (and others) had more positively, if blandly, called a "culture of poverty." While both Harrington and Moynihan wrote hoping to spur the country to action, in fact, the public began to interpret that "tangle of pathology" as an intractable and intrinsic feature of black urban life.

AFDC (12) (aka Welfare)
To exacerbate negative public perceptions, by the end of the decade the War on Poverty had actually succeeded in signing up nine out of ten eligible single mothers for the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program that Roosevelt had initiated thirty years earlier. Instead of small numbers of widows and their children receiving assistance, the welfare rolls were flooded with divorced and never-married mothers. Although it continued to serve more white than black families,  the program came to be associated in the media (and therefore in the public mind) with young, black, urban single mothers.

Great Society Funding Levels (12)
The War on Poverty ground to a halt before it had begun to take off. According to historian Michael Katz, the Office of Economic Opportunity (the hub of the War on Poverty) received less than 10 percent of what it needed to reach its goals, spending about $70 per poor person per year. It never reached the takeoff point normal in most federal programs. The War on Poverty proved to be only the briefest of skirmishes. The country gave itself no real chance to do anything about poverty.

Failure of the Great Society (12)
Worse yet, the perceived failure of the Great Society programs now became associated with a hopelessly flawed "big government" approach to poverty that, in "throwing money" at problems, was believed to worsen them. What, after all, can be done about a "pathology"? Within a few short years, before we had really tried anything substantive, ghetto poverty had become, we believed, intractable.

Chapter Two: "Pillaging the Ghetto" (14-28)

"I'M NOT PREJUDICED, BUT..."

In what ways do African-Americans face discrimination in the job market? (14)

• William Julius Wilson's in-depth examination of employer attitudes in Chicago demonstrates clearly that employers are reluctant to hire young, black men from the inner city, although they perceive black women less negatively....Deliberately or not, employers screen out black, inner-city applicants. They may refuse to consider otherwise adequately qualified applicants simply because they went to urban public schools, or they may avoid taking referrals from welfare programs or state employment services....The dialect of the black ghetto, black English vernacular, can also lead to problems....

Understand the “index of dissimilarity". (15)

• [T]he "index of dissimilarity," calculates the percentage of a minority population that would have to move into other neighborhoods in order to achieve an even distribution.... By 1910, however, the average index of dissimilarity in the black ghettos of the largest northern cities had reached almost 60, and in 1940, just before the outbreak of World War II, the average index of dissimilarity in northern cities had soared to almost 90, meaning that 90 percent of African Americans would have had to move from their neighborhoods into white ones in order to achieve perfect integration.

What were the “effects” of the following “causes”?
 

AMERICAN APARTHEID

Job Competition (16)
The sheer numbers of southern blacks who came north in the first great migration created unique problems. Racism flared. Employers and white workers sometimes forced skilled black craftsmen to start over as unskilled workers, while factory owners often hired newly arrived blacks as scabs to break strikes and prevent the establishment of unions.

1900-1950 Race Riots (16)
The role of African Americans as strikebreakers increased racial tension between working-class whites and blacks. Bombings and other violence threatened blacks, and beginning as early as 1900 massive race riots led by whites were directed against blacks. Blacks in the "wrong" parts of a city might be attacked; whites who lived in predominantly black areas moved out. Violence at the borders between white and black neighborhoods kept black areas from expanding.

Neighborhood Improvement Associations (16)
During the 1920s, whites formed "neighborhood improvement associations," primarily for the purpose of keeping blacks out of their neighborhoods. ... Neighborhood improvement associations collected funds to buy back property from black owners and offered cash bonuses to black renters to induce them to leave certain areas. Their most powerful tool was the "restrictive covenant," by which neighborhood whites entered into voluntary agreements that bound signers by force of law not to sell to blacks.

Early 20th Century Segregation (16)
In the first decades of the twentieth century, as levels of segregation increased, a new black middle class made up of businessmen and politicians arose.

Differences between immigrant & black political patterns (17)
The new black politics that emerged differed significantly from the traditional politics of European immigrant groups. Irish, Jewish, Italian, and German immigrants all relied to some degree on the voting and favor-granting powers offered by big city machine politics. Since traditional immigrant enclaves bustled with many nationalities, and since the majority of people with a common ethnic heritage had scattered around the city, ethnic groups historically gained political power by forging coalitions with each other to realize common goals. These coalitions led to other kinds of mutual cooperation and increased the pace of ethnic integration into the mainstream. Ethnic enclaves were but a transitional phase of immigrant assimilation, while under the unrelenting hostility of the larger society, ghettos became a permanent feature of black life.

African Americans had to find their political power largely in separation. Unlike other ethnic groups, African-American political power came primarily from their ability to vote as a block, under the leadership of powerful black politicians, which meant that those politicians had a stake in an area's continuing segregation. In effect, if African Americans wanted political power, they had to "take over" a particular area and dominate its politics. Even today, much of African American political power lies in black segregation. Rather than leading to coalitions, this side effect of segregation can often lead to mistrust and, ultimately, political marginalization.

Ghetto Population Increases (17)
As more African Americans moved into the ghettos, pressure for expansion mounted. The prices of property increased so that, paradoxically, property values on the black side of the black-white border were much higher than those on the white side.

1948 Supreme Court Ruling (17)
In Sheely v. Kramer, the Supreme Court declared residential segregation illegal, specifically outlawing the restrictive covenants that white "neighborhood improvement associations" had used so successfully to keep out blacks. This decision led to a gradual increase in the permeability of the borders of the ghetto. Permeable borders, however, hardly led to integration, for whites would ultimately begin to move out of neighborhoods if enough (or often any) black people moved in.

Block Busting (18)
Unscrupulous realtors, taking advantage of white fears, developed the practice of "block busting" within white communities along the borders of the ghetto. The realtor would spread rumors about a pending black "invasion" and peddle fear of declining property values and a black "take-over" of the community. These rumors, in turn, enabled the realtors to buy a few properties from panicked whites at fire-sale prices and then sell them to middle-class blacks brave enough to integrate. Once the rumors were thus given substance, property values fell as other whites hurried to sell and leave. The realtors were then able to buy up the remaining white properties cheaply and sell them to African Americans for exorbitant profits. Large black demand for housing encouraged real estate agents to subdivide the housing stock into multiple apartments thus degrading the values of the property.

Federal Road Building (18)
Federally funded road construction made easy commuting from suburban residence to urban jobs possible.

FHA & VA Mortgages (18)
FHA and VA mortgage guarantees made home ownership possible. Tax policy allowing deductions on home mortgage interest payments further encouraged ownership. Such government programs and policies were essentially subsidies to middle class  that sponsored white flight. While such flight relieved housing pressure in the cities and therefore allowed for the physical expansion of ghetto areas, it had no effect on the color line which was maintained despite massive population shifts to the suburbs.

Home Mortgage Interest Deductions (18)
Tax policy allowing deductions on home mortgage interest payments further encouraged ownership. Such government programs and policies were essentially subsidies to the middle class that sponsored white flight.

Black & White Integration Comfort Zones (18)
While they would not choose to be the only black family or one of very few black families in an otherwise white neighborhood, most African Americans would have chosen to live in integrated communities. The problem, of course, is that once the percentage of black residents reaches a point where most African Americans might feel comfortable moving in, the white population already felt uncomfortable and had begun moving out.

Concentrated Poverty (18-19)
Among the least appreciated of segregation's insidious consequences is the concentration of poverty that occurs when a population that is poorer for any reason is also segregated and isolated. Because of their history, persistent discrimination against them, and fewer opportunities available to them, African Americans are, as a group, poorer than other Americans. Segregation, therefore, forces African Americans to live in neighborhoods that are more likely than white neighborhoods to have a higher proportion of those who are poor.

The consequences of this concentration can be significant. To take but a single example, where more people in an area are poor, fewer have adequate resources to maintain their property, and buildings soon begin to show signs of disrepair: a broken window fixed with cardboard instead of a pane of glass, a sagging porch, peeling paint. Other property owners are extremely sensitive to these small signs and will view them as signals of decline, leading to reduced incentives to keep up their own properties, which continues in a downward spiral.

PUNISHING THE CHILDREN

Local Funding for Schools (19)
The concentration of poverty due to segregation has an especially pernicious effect on the educational facilities available to those who live in the ghetto. Because elementary and secondary schools are funded primarily through local property taxes, cities with large numbers of poor people have fewer resources per child and, therefore, less money to fund education.

“Non-educational” problems of school kids (19)
Children who live in poverty bring more hunger, homelessness, exposure to violence, and other problems to school with them than, say, suburban students, and these "non-educational" problems demand resources that have to be pulled away from already meager educational allocations. Ghetto schools should be getting far more money than suburban schools because the problems they have to deal with tend to be more confounding and deeper. Instead, not surprisingly, they usually get less.

Magnet Schools (19)
The "magnet school," which usually emphasizes a particular area of study like science or the arts, takes selected students from a district's many schools, grouping together those who have similar interests and abilities. Usually, these schools have more funds, are better staffed, get more access to supplies and equipment, and maintain better physical plants. They are of very significant benefit...to the children who are selected.... Unfortunately, by skimming off the best students, the most committed or assertive parents, and often a higher-than-average proportion of a school district's budget, magnet schools also make the work of ordinary schools that much more difficult.

Voucher Schools and Charter Schools (20)
Each voucher usually represents the average amount of money the public school system spends per student. Parents can use it to pay tuition or partial tuition at any school, public or private, that will accept the child. Although not true of all parochial schools, most private schools cost far more than the amount of a voucher for "average public school costs." Poor families unable to afford the added expense will not benefit.... Although certain demonstration voucher projects have successfully targeted the more difficult inner-city students, any widespread voucher program will also likely lead to the siphoning off of the better students. Vouchers also threaten to weaken public schools financially.

1896 Plessey v Ferguson (20)
In its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision ratifying the legality of segregation in public facilities, the Supreme Court created the doctrine of "separate but equal." Schools could be segregated as long as the education provided to black students was equal to that provided white students. Justice John Marshall Harlan, in a bitter dissent from that decision, noted that given the social and economic inequality between blacks and whites in the United States at that time, "separate" would never be "equal," a prediction realized in the next century.

1954 Brown v Board of Education (20)
In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court recognized the failure of "separate but equal" and demanded the integration of public schools. Almost fifty years later we have not only failed to meet the conditions of the 1954 decision, we have also failed to meet the conditions of the 1896 decision. Schools are still largely separate and unequal. In fifteen of the forty-five largest school districts studied (including New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Memphis) fewer than half of African-American students graduated from high school with a regular diploma. Without a decent education, a child is handicapped for life.

SICK AND POOR  (Pre-Obamacare)

Health Insurance System (20)
According to the United States Census, in 2000 over 38 million Americans (14 percent) did not have health insurance at any time during the entire year. We tend to assume that if people are poor enough, they are eligible for some kind of governmental health coverage. That assumption is wrong. Less than one-third of the people living in poverty are even eligible for Medicaid, the primary form of health insurance available to the poor, and the rate of the uninsured among poor people is over twice as high as among the general population....This means that in any sort of health emergency the poor must spend a significant percentage of their income on clinic or emergency room visits, especially when young children are involved.

Medicaid System (21)
Even those who do qualify for Medicaid must undergo an application process that can be arduous and discouraging. Until the 1996 passage of the legislation known as Welfare Reform, most poor families who received what we usually think of as welfare (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC) received Medicaid automatically. Because more than half of these families have been moved off the rolls, they must apply separately for Medicaid, a process that can, in some states, prove virtually impossible to complete for a person who must go to work each day. Once covered by Medicaid, the poor face a sometimes-insurmountable hurdle: finding a doctor who will accept Medicaid payment.

Emergency Room Treatment (21)
The poor must usually go to hospital emergency rooms or public clinics for their care. But hospitals are not good places to receive routine health care, although they generally handle emergencies well, even for the poor. In fact, federal law requires that any hospital admit and care for emergency patients regardless of ability to pay, but it is now an unusual hospital that offers indigent patients much in the way of continuing care, preventive medicine, or help with routine medical problems.

URBAN POVERTY HEALTH ISSUES

A SECOND GHETTO: PRISON

In 1971, there were fewer than 200,000 people in America's state and federal prisons. By 2001, that number had grown almost to 1.4 million, or close to a seven-fold increase. If local jails, youth facilities, military prisons, and other forms of imprisonment are included, on any given day over two million Americans are incarcerated, a rate of 736 inmates per 100,000 population. This rate is the highest in the world. Only Russia (with a rate of 675 per 100,000) and other countries of the former Soviet Union even come close to our propensity to incarcerate.

"Three Strikes and You're Out" (24)
The impact of the generally bipartisan demand for "law and order" began to be felt in the early 1980s, when both state legislatures and Congress started to write into law not only lengthier sentences for various crimes, but also "mandatory minimum" sentences. Such laws took from judges the discretion they had previously had in the sentencing process, when they could consider the particular circumstances of the offense committed and of the person who committed it. The result has been a substantial increase in the average length of time served in prison. At both federal and state levels, "three strikes" laws have been passed that mandate sentences of twenty-five years to life for the third felony offense. In states like California, these three strikes can be for relatively minor offenses, including drug possession.

Even these figures pale next to the staggering incarceration rates within the African-American community. In the year 2000, roughly one out of every three black males between eighteen and thirty-four years of age was under the active supervision of the criminal justice system: under arrest, awaiting trial, awaiting sentencing, on probation, in jail or prison, in half-way houses or other mandated programs, or on parole. In Washington, D.C., half of all young black men are currently in the criminal justice system. In nearby Baltimore, it's even worse.

Plea Bargaining Practices (25)
The mandatory minimum sentence that has taken power away from the judge has for practical purposes transferred that power to the prosecuting attorney who decides not only what charges will be brought against defendants, but also whether or not to prosecute in federal court, where sentencing standards are more severe than in most state courts. Thus, the prosecuting attorney has the authority to offer a plea bargain for, say, a one- or two-year sentence versus facing trial on a charge that might carry a mandatory minimum of twenty years. It often seems in the best interests of even those who are innocent to plead guilty and take the lesser sentence.

War on Drugs (25)
The war on drugs has been the major cause of the increase in incarceration of black inner-city residents. "Declared" in the early 1980s, the emphasis of this war nationwide has been on law enforcement and the incarceration of drug offenders, not on prevention and treatment. It has also concentrated drug law enforcement on inner-city areas and instituted harsher sentencing policies, particularly for crack cocaine. Thanks to this war (which has in truth been largely a war on the poor), between 1985 and 1995 the number of black state prison inmates sentenced for drug offenses rose by more than 700 percent.

Crack & Powder Cocaine Double-Standard (26)
Crack cocaine and powder cocaine have the same chemical composition, and powder cocaine can easily be transformed into equal weights of crack. Crack, however, is marketed in smaller, less expensive quantities and has, therefore, more often been used by those in low-income and minority communities; whereas powder cocaine is more likely to be used by the affluent. In federal court and in many state courts, the penalty for selling five grains of crack cocaine is the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence as the sentence for selling five hundred grams of powder cocaine.

Drug Treatment vs. Criminal Justice System (26)
Drug treatment both within and outside the criminal justice system would clearly be more cost-effective in controlling drug abuse and crime than the continued expansion of the prison system. The RAND foundation: every dollar spent on drug treatment would reduce drug use eight times more than spending the same dollar to expand the use of mandatory sentencing for drug offenders. Similarly, expanding the use of treatment has been estimated to reduce drug-related crime up to fifteen times as much as mandatory sentencing. Studies of drug treatment for the incarcerated have also shown that those who receive drug treatment are significantly less likely to return to prison for another offense than those who do not. Unfortunately, few prisoners receive drug treatment, just as few poor drug users have access to effective drug treatment programs of any sort.

Reduced Funding for Anti-Poverty Programs (27)
With the deterioration of the social safety net (over the last twenty years government spending for almost every anti-poverty program except Medicaid has decreased), imprisonment has become our social policy: our employment initiative, our drug treatment program, our mental health policy, our anti-poverty effort, and our program for children in trouble.

Post-Incarceration Discrimination (27)
The benefits of imprisonment for less serious crimes, especially low-level drug selling or possession, are far less clear. Imprisonment also deprives children of fathers, women of husbands and partners, and the community of human resources that could provide positive benefits, including the supervision of young people and other elements of informal social control. As more young people grow up having parents and siblings and friends who are incarcerated, jail time comes to be seen as a normal aspect of the life experience, and the deterrent effect of prison is diminished.

WORKING-AND POOR

Lower Skills Pay Scales (28)
Because of the globalization of the economy, there seems to be a decreased demand for less-skilled workers across the country. Workers in the United States now compete directly with workers in underdeveloped countries, and corporations have too often chosen to move less-skilled jobs out of the country. As a result of decreased demand, wages have declined just as the technological skills required by many companies have risen, leaving the ill-educated, technologically untrained poor behind.