[Mb-civic] The Price of Low Expectations - William Raspberry - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Price of Low Expectations

By William Raspberry
Monday, October 17, 2005; Page A15

In one recent year, just under half of all young black men in the 
District of Columbia were in prison, on parole or probation, awaiting 
trial or sentencing, or being sought on a warrant. In Baltimore, one in 
five black men aged 20 to 30 was in custody. Numbers like these no 
longer surprise.

This may: "High levels of incarceration concentrated in impoverished 
communities have a destabilizing effect on community life, so that the 
most basic underpinnings of informal social control are damaged. This, 
in turn, reproduces the very dynamics that sustain crime." The quote, 
from Todd Clear, a professor of criminal justice at the City University 
of New York, was called to my attention by Eric Lotke, who has expanded 
on Clear's work.

It sums up what I was trying to say in a recent column about elephants 
and delinquency.

Several readers wondered if I was advocating the unleashing on hapless 
inner-city communities of killers, rapists, drug fiends and sex abusers 
as a way of providing role models for young men. (Teenage male elephants 
in a South African game park stopped their delinquent behavior after 
several adult bulls were introduced into the herd.) Wouldn't the herd 
(and wouldn't America's inner cities) be worse off with the introduction 
of adult males of certifiable bad behavior?

It's a good question, and I offer three responses.

The first is that most of the crimes that account for the post-1980 
swelling of America's inmate population were nonviolent offenses: drug 
offenses overwhelmingly, but also petty theft, larceny, shoplifting, 
etc. -- exacerbated by mandatory sentencing and three-strikes 
legislation. It's reasonable to ask whether rehabilitation efforts and 
non-prison punishment might be a saner way to deal with these crimes 
that are virtually denuding many communities of their male populations. 
No one is advocating the release of gangbangers, street thugs and killers.

The second response is that the men we are talking about, while they may 
not be paragons, are not necessarily dangers to their communities. 
Analogies might include members of the Mafia, who, in some cases, made 
their immediate communities more stable, and men like Saddam Hussein, 
Anastasio Somoza or Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose removal (for whatever 
well-intended reasons) left their societies significantly less stable. 
Sometimes even good intentions can blow up in our face.

And here's the third: We are not inherently good or bad, law-abiding or 
criminal, but are nudged by forces both within and outside us into 
becoming what we become.

Some combination of forces has convinced dismaying numbers of black men 
that they are largely unnecessary. The society isolates them as 
dangerous, or potentially so; employers assume they are unreliable, 
without fundamental skills and unlikely to learn on the job; their 
neighbors fear (or admire) them as ruthless; and even the mothers of 
their children may not consider them fit material for husbands.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/16/AR2005101600800.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20051017/4161b3e9/attachment.htm