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The School to Prison Pipeline: Criminalizing Black Youth in the Classroom | Video Infographic

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For as long as the government has kept track, the economic statistics have shown a troubling racial gap. Black people are twice as likely as white people to be out of work and looking for a job. This fact was as true in 1954 as it is today.

The most recent report puts the white unemployment rate at around 4.5 percent. The black unemployment rate? About 8.8 percent.

But the economic picture for black Americans is far worse than those statistics indicate. The unemployment rate only measures people who are both living at home and actively looking for a job.

The hitch: A lot of black men aren't living at home and can't look for jobs - because they're behind bars.

Though there are nearly 1.6 million Americans in state or federal prison, their absence is not accounted for in the figures that politicians and policymakers use to make decisions. As a result, we operate under a distorted picture of the nation's economic health.

There's no simple way to estimate the impact of mass incarceration on the jobs market. But here's a simple thought experiment. Imagine how the white and black unemployment rates would change if all the people in prison were added to the unemployment rolls.

According to a Wonkblog analysis of government statistics, about 1.6 percent of prime-age white men (25 to 54 years old) are institutionalized. If all those 590,000 people were recognized as unemployed, the unemployment rate for prime-age white men would increase from about 5 percent to 6.4 percent.

For prime-age black men, though, the unemployment rate would jump from 11 percent to 19 percent. That's because a far higher fraction of black men - 7.7 percent, or 580,000 people - are institutionalized.

Now, the racial gap starts to look like a racial chasm. (When you take into account local jails, which are not included in these statistics, the situation could be even worse.)

"Imprisonment makes the disadvantaged literally invisible," writes Harvard sociologist Bruce Western in his book, "Punishment and Inequality in America." Western was among the first scholars to argue that America has locked up so many people it needs to rethink how it measures the economy.

Over the past 40 years, the prison population has quintupled. As a consequence of disparities in arrests and sentencing, this eruption has disproportionately affected black communities. Black men are imprisoned at six times the rate of white men. In 2003, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that black men have a 1 in 3 chance of going to federal or state prison in their lifetimes. For some high-risk groups, the economic consequences have been staggering. According to Census data from 2014, there are more young black high school dropouts in prison than have jobs.
[Researchers have discovered a new and surprising racial bias in the criminal justice system]
The economic data sweeps these people under the rug, making the situation look far too optimistic for African-Americans. Western started writing about this problem in the early 2000s with Becky Pettit, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Austin. They've published reports in top journals, and have each authored books on the subject.

It's taken a long time for this blind spot to be recognized. Much of the debate about prisons has focused on disparities in the justice system, and rightly so, Western says. The problem begins there. But when a large chunk of the working-age population vanishes from public life, the repercussions spread.

One in nine black children has had a parent behind bars. One in thirteen black adults can't vote because of their criminal records. Discrimination on the job market deepens racial inequality. Not only does a criminal record make it harder to get hired, but studies find that a criminal record is more of a handicap for black men. Employers are willing to give people second chances, but less so if they're black.

"Jim Crow and slavery were caste systems. So is our current system of mass incarceration," wrote civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander in her 2010 book "The New Jim Crow."

These consequences entangle the broader economy.Yet, many people who study employment and the job market haven't been paying attention to the criminal justice system. That's a big mistake, according to Western.

"From my point of view," he says, "mass incarceration is so deeply connected to American poverty and economic inequality."

A look at the troubling data

To see Western's point, consider the statistics for people at high risk of arrest - young men (aged 20-34) who never finished high school.

Let's set aside for a moment the unemployment rate, which is a blinkered measure of the economy. Only people who have recently looked for a job are considered unemployed. Instead, economists often focus on a different number, the fraction of people who have jobs. This is called the "employment-population ratio."

Overall, about 60 percent of young white dropouts and 36 percent of young black dropouts were employed in 2014, according to the Census's Current Population Survey. But there's a caveat to that number. It excludes people in prison or otherwise institutionalized.

The Census separately measures this population. According to that data, about 7.6 percent of these white men were institutionalized in 2014. (Overwhelmingly, this means jail, but it could also mean a mental hospital or a nursing home.) For black men, the fraction is so staggering, it seems like a typo - 29 percent of black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 34 were institutionalized in 2014.

When you add in all of the incarcerated, thenumbers become much bleaker and the racial gaps much wider. In reality, only about 54 percent of young white male high-school dropouts had jobs in 2014. And only 25 percent of their black counterparts were employed.

As the above numbers indicate, there are more young black male high school dropouts behind bars than have jobs. This is a very high-risk population. But even if we zoom out, the data still are skewed.

Here are the same numbers for all prime-age men in 2014. Officially, 84 percent of white men between 25-54 were working in 2014, compared to 71 percent of black men. After including the incarcerated, the fraction of white men who have jobs hardly changes. But the black employment-population ratio drops to 66 percent.

How incarceration has changed the economy

The prison boom has made such a dent that recently, social scientists have completely reconsidered how much progress the black community has made in recent decades.

Derek Neal, an economist at The University of Chicago, and Armin Rick, an economist at Cornell, argue that mass incarceration has masked a lot of economic pain and a lot of inequality.

The official statistics are "very deceptive when the trends in the fraction incarcerated are changing," Neal says. "You can actually measure an increasing employment rate or a falling unemployment rate simply because, over this period, we've put more of the people who have trouble finding jobs in prison."

Neal and Rick explored a slightly different thought experiment. What if all these men had never been arrested? What if they all had jobs? What if they were earning wages on par with similar men with similar levels of education?

The effects are not all expected, or even necessarily positive. According to Neal and Rick's calculations, if all these prisoners were actually working, they would drag down the median white wage by just a little, but it would drag down the median black wage by a lot, since so many black men are incarcerated.

The chart below shows the hypothetical black-white wage gap compared to the actual black-white wage gap, among men who are 11-15 years out of school. The 1960s and 1970s yielded incredible economic progress for black Americans - dividends from civil rights reform. But the trend stalled in subsequent decades. Then, the financial crisis hit, wiping out much of those past gains.

Neal and Rick find that in 2010, black men earned about 75 cents for every dollar white men out of prison made. But if all the men in prison also had jobs, there would be a lot more inequality - black men would only be earning about 65 cents on the dollar. Had all these people been on the job market instead of in prison, they would have competedwith other workers for jobs, driving wages down.

"The growth of incarceration rates among black men in recent decades," they write, "combined with the sharp drop in black employment rates during the Great Recession have left most black men in a position relative to white men that is really no better than the position they occupied only a few years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965."

Western and Pettit argue that the wages for low-skilled black workers in the 1990s rose in part because incarceration reduced the number of people competing for work. As incarceration rates slowly start to fall, there will be pressure on the economy to absorb some of the most hard-to-employ people in society. "Somehow we're going to have to figure out how to address the really severe employment problems of low-skill men," Western says.

This will prove particularly difficult because mass incarceration's ill effects are concentrated in places already in distress. Researchers once estimated that, in some inner-city neighborhoods, up to one-fifth of the young black men are behind bars at any given moment.

In their absence, their communities start to fracture. So when they get out, they find that there are no jobs and no support networks. "The impact of incarceration on communities and the impact of communities on reentry together create a pernicious cycle of decline," professors Jeffrey Morenoff and David Harding wrote in the Annual Review of Sociology in 2014.

For now, there are still so many people behind bars that it continues to warp our sense of reality. Recently, politicians challenged Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen to recognize the vast racial inequalities in the economy. They cited the black unemployment rate - twice the white unemployment rate. But however bad those numbers seem, the truth, after accounting for incarceration, is even worse. So p erhaps the next time the jobs report comes out, there could be an extra chart to recognize the 1.6 million prisoners in America.

They don't show up anywhere in the government's measurements of economic activity, but their absence is dearly felt.

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America has locked up so many black people it has warped our sense of reality

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For as long as the government has kept track, the economic statistics have shown a troubling racial gap. Black people are twice as likely as white people to be out of work and looking for a job. This fact was as true in 1954 as it is today.

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Bryan Stevenson, the nation's premier lawyer on mass incarceration and the death penalty, says slavery never ended. It just evolved.

I just spent two days with 50 other faith leaders at Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., where Bryan emphasized four basic essentials for criminal justice reform in America: 1) Proximity to those most impacted, 2) Changing the narrative, 3) Hope replacing hopelessness, and 4) Committing ourselves to uncomfortable things, because injustice is never overcome by just doing comfortable things.

We went deep underneath these issues to our foundational American history of how white supremacy served as justification for slavery, a white supremacy that continues to this day. We spoke of the narrative of racial difference, white supremacy, and the accompanying white privilege as a disease that we have all been infected with in America, and that only telling the truth about race in our country will set us all free.

Together, we made pilgrimages to two nearby sites where black men were lynched. We held memorial services in memory of their lives on the land where indifference to their humanity killed them. Under Bryan's leadership, the Equal Justice Initiative is planning memorials at every lynching spot across the country to help us remember the terrorist racial violence that sprung from and enforced white supremacy. A national museum is also being planned in Montgomery to remember and honor those untold thousands who were lynched. Soil from each site is being collected and memorialized in glass jars marked with each person's name, birth and death year, and the town of the lynching.

We pilgrimaged to a lonely spot on the outskirts of the city and another site in the town of Wetumpka. We dug dirt from the holy ground and placed it in those jars. We remembered and prayed for those lynching victims by name. It was a powerful and moving experience for all.

But perhaps the most impactful moment over our two days was a visit from Mr. Anthony Ray Hinton who spent 30 years in solitary confinement on death row in Alabama for a crime he did not commit. The story of one of the longest serving death row prisoners in the history of Alabama, despite the incredibly obvious evidence of his innocence, so clearly demonstrates the structural and systemic racial and economic injustice of our criminal justice system and its death penalty. Mr. Hinton told us his story. "I didn't do it," he told the officer who sat with him in the back of the police car. The officer replied, "Maybe not, but you'll do." Then he told the innocent man, "You're going to be convicted for five reasons: you're black, a white man will say you shot him, the prosecutor will be white, the judge will be white, and there will be an all-white jury." Hinton told us, "They knew I was innocent, but they didn't care."

Stevenson, who disproved the false evidence against Hinton, says this: "Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice. I can't think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform than what has happened to Anthony Ray Hinton."

As he exited the prison doors in April of this year, Hinton said: "The sun does shine." He told us that Mark 11:24 was his morning and evening coffee: "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."

Despite his tremendous pain and suffering over three decades, the survival and resilience of Anthony Ray Hinton demonstrates the power of God. I don't think I have ever met a man whose life better shows the reality of that power and that hope. Mr. Hinton's clarity, faith, perseverance, imagination, gift of humor, and almost unbelievable forgiveness ("I forgive those who knowingly oppressed me, not so they can sleep at night, but so that I can") were amazing to behold. His extraordinary and, I would say, miraculous story was an embodiment of the gospel that we all believe and preach. In a very special hour we spent together, Mr. Hinton showed us "the word made flesh."

In Montgomery, at the offices of EJI (in a former slave warehouse in the town that auctioned off more human lives than any other place in the South), we spent two extraordinary days of deepening and widening our understanding of "America's original sin" and how it still lingers on. It was confirmation for me that the message of our book of that same title is sorely needed throughout our nation today. It deepened my resolve to turn what would normally be a "book tour" into a "town meeting tour" to ask ourselves: What does this mean right here and right now for us in this nation and this local community?

I invite you to send this brief preview of America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America -- with an extraordinary essay by Bryan Stevenson as the foreword -- to your networks of family, friends, and colleagues with my hope that it can be used as a catalyst for the new conversations and actions that we so urgently need. Let us know how we can be of service to you in those local community forums. We encourage you to pre-order the book and not just read it, but use it.

In Alabama, we talked a lot about change and that it is never too late to do justice. As Bryan said to us all, "I have always had to believe in things I haven't seen." And that is the nature and power of Christian hope.

Jim Wallis is president of Sojourners. His book, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, will be released in January.

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Bryan Stevenson, the nation's premier lawyer on mass incarceration and the death penalty, says slavery never ended. It just evolved.

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The war on drugs: Is it a genuine public health crusade or an attempt to carry out what author Michelle Alexander characterizes as "the New Jim Crow"?

A new report by Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine suggests the latter. Specifically, Baum refers to a quote from John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief for President Richard Nixon when the administration declared its war on drugs in 1971. According to Baum, Ehrlichman said in 1994 that the drug war was a ploy to undermine Nixon's political opposition - meaning, black people and critics of the Vietnam War:

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

This is an incredibly blunt, shocking response - one with troubling implications for the 45-year-old war on drugs.

It's possible Ehrlichman wasn't being honest, given that he reportedly felt bitter and betrayed by Nixon after he spent time in prison over the Watergate scandal. Nixon also very much despised drugs, which likely played a role in his policies beyond political goals. And his drug czar, Jerome Jaffe, strongly pushed for treating drugs as a health issue, not solely a criminal matter as Ehrlichman suggested.

But the claim of racial prejudice is not implausible. Although black Americans aren't more likely to use or sell drugs, they're much more likely to be arrested for them. And when black people are convicted of drug charges, they generally face longer prison sentences for the same crimes, according to a 2012 report from the US Sentencing Commission.

Ehrlichman claimed this was a goal of the drug war, not an unintended consequence. And Baum cites this as one of many reasons to end the drug war once and for all.

Ending the war on drugs doesn't have to be a binary choice between prohibition and legalization

Baum's argument: Drug prohibition began with poor intentions, it has contributed to terrible consequences (racial disparities in the justice system and drug-fueled violence around the world), and it has failed to significantly curtail drug abuse and trafficking. So we should try a new approach - and legalize and regulate drugs.

But in doing this, Baum glosses over a few options. Even if it's true that the drug war was launched on faulty reasons, that doesn't mean it hasn't led to some benefits. And even if those benefits aren't worth the costs of the current model of prohibition, there are alternatives to pulling back drug prohibition besides legalization.

As I've written before, the drug war does likely prevent some drug use: One study by Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that prohibition multiplies the price of hard drugs like cocaine by as much as 10 times. And illicit drugs obviously aren't available through easy means - one can't just walk into a CVS and buy heroin. So the drug war is likely stopping some drug use: Caulkins estimates that legalization could lead hard drug abuse to triple, although he told me it could go much higher.
there are alternatives to pulling back drug prohibition besides legalization
America's latest drug epidemic provides some evidence for Caulkins's claims. In the past couple decades, doctors loosened access to very addictive and potentially deadly opioid painkillers. Painkiller abuse exploded, leading not just to more overdose deaths but to people trying other opioids, such as heroin, and overdosing on those as well. So more access led to more abuse and deaths.

Does this mean the war on drugs, as it's currently fought, is worth it? Not necessarily. It's a matter of weighing the pros and cons of the current model of drug prohibition.

So maybe the drug war reduces drug use. But it also enables and reinforces the justice system's biases against minority Americans. And it perpetuates a black market for drugs that fuels violence in the US and around the world, particularly in Mexico.

But there are options to draw down the war on drugs without legalization. The US could decriminalize - remove jail time and other criminal penalties for personal possession but not sales - and emphasize prevention and treatment, as Portugal has done. It could allow supervised injection sites for heroin users to provide a safe place to use the drug, as Canada, Switzerland, and several others have done. It could allow for the medical use of some drugs, such as psychedelics, as some researchers have pushed for. These are steps countries and states could take without legalizing drugs.

Baum does, however, acknowledge that even if a country does legalize, there are various ways to do it. Governments could spend much, much more on prevention and treatment programs alongside legalization to deal with a potential wave of new drug users. They could require and regulate licenses to buy drugs, as some states do with guns. Or they could ban private, for-profit sales of drugs, limiting greedy companies' abilities to market and sell the drugs no matter the consequence (as tobacco companies have done to get Americans hooked on cigarettes - to still very deadly effects).

None of these policies would wholly eliminate drug abuse, drug deaths, or drug-related violence and crime. But drug policy is often about picking the best out of the available bad options, rather than picking the perfect solution.

Still, there are far more options than prohibition and legalization, and different drugs with all sorts of different risks likely merit different policies. But it's going to be very difficult to get to the right balance of policies if the debate is framed as deciding between only legalization and prohibition.

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Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies

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The war on drugs: Is it a genuine public health crusade or an attempt to carry out what author Michelle Alexander characterizes as "the New Jim Crow"? A new report by Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine suggests the latter.

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In this scene from the movie " Deep Cover 1992 " The drug enforcement agent is explaining to officer Stevens about crack babies and why he's here , doing his job.