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