TO BE EQUAL COLUMN 24 Shadows Over Black America By Hugh B. Price President National Urban League The signs and statistics mapping the progress African Americans have made during the 1990s have been very, very good recently. Driven by the so-called Long Boom of the American economy, the growth of the number of blacks with middle-class incomes continues, and their expansion into more of the significant occupational sectors of the society has become more pronounced as well. The even more welcome news is that the long period of prosperity finally appears to be improving the terrible job status of poor young black males. According to a study published this month by economists Richard B. Freeman, of Harvard, and William M. Rodgers III, of the College of William and Mary, they're working in greater numbers and earning bigger paychecks than ever before. (One thing the study proved-again-is that, for all the subtle, and not so subtle, accusations that poor black males are lazy and shiftless, they, like most other human beings, hunger for the chance to be productive.) As Newsweek Magazine noted in its recent cover story, "By a wide array of measures, now is a great time-the best time ever-to be black in America." Yet, as Newsweek itself recognized, the Black Experience in America remains, even in these best of times, shadowed by an equally significant set of statistics and signs that tell us how much progress remains to be made. After all, the unemployment rate of young black men is still, at 17.6 percent, nearly three times that of their white counterparts. That fact and the personal stories of dashed hopes behind it led Boston University economist Glenn C. Loury to write that "(t)he unfortunate reality is that race-based barriers to job access are a seemingly permanent feature of the economy." Loury also pointedly noted that we can expect the black unemployment rate to re-gain astronomical levels once the current expansion ends. But there's little doubt that the most poignant-and frightening-statistics that becloud Black America's and America's present and future are the sharp increases of the 1980s and 1990s in the incarceration of black men, and now, increasingly, black women. That was brought home to me recently by an alarming documentary on the impact of California's five-year-old "three strikes" law that's been airing on Public Broadcasting Service stations around the country this month. The documentary, sponsored by the Television With A Point of View (POV) project, and produced by Michael J. Moore, is called "The Legacy: Murder & Media, Politics & Prisons." It examines the tragic results the politically-popular but wrong-headed "lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key" attitude toward the crime problem has produced. The draconian three-strikes law, and similar ones 24 other states and the federal government have enacted, impose long sentences, up to life with no possibility of parole, on those who commit felonies a second and a third time. The felonies that trigger the law for individuals aren't just murder, kidnapping, assault and rape. In some states, including California, non-violent felonies are also counted. Indeed, a startling result of California's three-strikes law is that 81 percent of the 40,000 people sentenced under it thus far were convicted of non-violent offenses, such as theft or possession of narcotics. Just one percent of the sentences were imposed on people convicted of murder. The three strikes law, and their kin foster the pretense that American society can thrive even while it imprisons an ever-increasing proportion of its population: They pretend that society can bear the human-and financial-cost deliberately warehousing a growing proportion of its population. That's terrible economics, given that nationally the average cost of housing an inmate is $21,000 a year, and that the cost of incarceration for older prisoners-whose numbers of course, will grow significantly under these laws-is two to three times that. As one might expect, African Americans bear the disproportionate weight of the three- strikes and other draconian laws, just as they do for incarceration in general. Currently, African Americans, just 12 percent of the total population, make up about half of the 1.8 million offenders in state and federal prisons and local jails, and their numbers are growing at an alarming rate. In California, blacks are 7 percent of the state's population, but 31 percent of its prison population, and 40 percent of those sentenced under the state's three-strikes rule. This situation is not just a matter of the bad actors among African Americans getting their just desserts. I don't pretend they don;t exist. They do, for African Americans, as for other groups. But we know conclusively that racial bias in the criminal justice system-including racial profiling by police, and discriminatory decisions by prosecutors and judges-fill the jails and prisons with blacks who should not be for the length of time they are, or should not be there at all. 24 TBE 6/14/99 TO BE EQUAL 120 Wall Street, NY, NY 10005