Richard Cohen checked out the Pew report on mass incareration and has responded with a simple question: Why are all these young black males killing one another?

The Washington Post columnist isn’t a tuff-on-crime zealot–he’s asking an honest question.  The same question frequently surfaces at predominantly African American gatherings.

The Pew study, which I discussed in a recent post, doesn’t address black-on-black crime, so why is Cohen bringing it up?  Two reasons: (1) Americans don’t want to rescind the policy of mass incarceration if it’s going to put dangerous people back on the streets, and (2) unlike arrest and convictions statistics, homicide stats can’t be fudged.  The number of stiffs in the morgue is unaffected by the ideology of the person doing the counting.  We can argue that black males are in the joint on drug charges due to institutional racism, but how do we explain all the violence?  Are white racists responsible for that too?

The current criminal justice debate (to the extent there is one) bounces between liberals screaming about racism and conservatives waxing righteous on the personal responsibility theme.  Cohen, for his part, is willing to stipulate to high degrees of racism in the system (personal and institutional); he is merely suggesting that the cultural implosion of “the black underclass” is also part of the problem.

Richard Cohen poses a good question, but he is a bit short on answers.  Like most Americans, the man is confused.  We don’t like to be called “the incarceration nation”; but our public safety concerns and our commitment to the American virtues of hard work and personal responsibility make us uneasy about government-driven solutions.  If the problem is fundamentally spiritual and moral, what does Washington have to offer?

At root, mass incarceration isn’t about spirituality or morality; it’s about economics.

The political success of Barack Obama, Cohen suggests, gives the lie to the complaint that African Americans can’t make it in America.  A valid point.  Most black Americans have prospered since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.  We don’t have anything approaching economic or political parity, but amazing progress has been made . . . unless we are talking about poor black males who drop out of school.

In 1960, only 1.4% of black male dropouts was incarcerated; by 2000, the incarceration rate among this demographic had risen to a shocking 25%.  That’s right: one-in-four black male high school dropouts is currently locked up.  In 2004, 72% of black dropouts were out of work, compared to 34% of white and only 19% of Hispanic dropouts.

How do we account for this shocking free fall in employment among the most vulnerable members of the black community? 

In the late 1960s, just as the civil rights movement was beginning to bear fruit, a fundamental economic shift began in America.  We moved from an industrial-manufacturing economy desperate for cheap, unskilled labor to a post-industrial, service-based economy with a steadily declining demand for uneducated and unskilled workers.

The vast majority of drug dealers and prison inmates are high school dropouts who haven’t adapted to the new economy.  The erosion of conventional economic opportunity in poor black communities spawned an underground street economy. 

Most black-on-black crime is rooted in a lawless street environment where competition for turf and (far more frequently) mindless squabbles over girls and petty slights easily devolve into gun play.   

Mass incarceration is America’s public policy response to the street economy.  Unfortunately, the solution has encouraged the problems it was designed to alleviate.

A young, street level drug dealer goes to prison where he congregates with equally uneducated street punks.  Eventually, usually within a year or two, he is back on the streets dragging a felony conviction behind him like a ball and chain.  Felony status functions like a negative credential.  If a college degree translates into opportunity; a felony record slams doors wherever you turn.  You can’t get the kind of job that would allow you to support a family.  You can’t get a Pell grant.  You can’t get public assistance.  In some states, you can’t even vote.

Driven even further away from the conventional economy, the young man returns to the streets.  Soon he lives so far from the rhythms of the straight marketplace he becomes virtually unemployable–unless we’re talking drugs. 

A year after being released back to the streets, 75% of uneducated inmates are unemployed and 45% are back behind bars.  In time, a prison stretch becomes an expected part of the game.

Street punks make atrocious fathers, but that doesn’t stop them from begetting children.  Partners and children are negatively impacted by the dysfunction of absentee dads.  The children of incarcerated parents are six times as likely as more fortunate children to experience incarceration themselves.

But it doesn’t end there.  The stigma associated with young black males extends from unemployed ex-offenders to the hard-working and the ambitious.  Young black males are treated with suspicion by law enforcement.  Charged with a crime they often take a plea bargain even if they are innocent.  Studies show that the average employer is more likely to employ a white felon than a black applicant with a clean record. 

We are now dealing with entire communities shaped by incarceration in which young children grow up surrounded by unemployed grown-ups with little personal ambition.  The values and survival skills required for street survival are antithetical to the values and survival skills demanded in the mainstream working world. 

Eventually, a separate society emerges: a nation within a nation.  On HBO’s The Wire, police officers and gang bangers inhabit a world inhabited by two distinct groups of people: “niggas” and “citizens”.  For members of the prison-shaped community, the presumption of innocence is a polite fiction.  Convictions are obtained with ittle evidence or, as happened in Tulia, Texas, no real evidence at all. 

As a practical matter, participatory democracy is limited to citizens.  A we’re-all-in-this-thing-together spirit gives way to a hardboiled us-against-them sentiment.  A politics of fear stalks the land.  As prison-shaped communities grow, public safety erodes.  Everyone is affected.  Together we are being sucked into a tragic death spiral.

So, what’s the answer?  First, let’s stop the bleeding.  The war on drugs needs to be mothballed–the law of supply and demand insures that street punks will be peddling their wares no matter how much tax money we invest in stopping them.  Let’s take the incarceration rate back to where it was in 1980, before the madness began.

Finally, let’s realize that our problem is primarily economic.  We don’t have enough low-skilled jobs for all the low-skilled workers and we don’t have enough high-skill workers for the high-skill jobs.  Let’s send our best teachers to the worst schools and pay them accordingly.  Let’s find a new way to finance public education–a system limited by the local tax base will never bring good education to poor communities.

Thanks to mass incarceration, the social mores of the prison have become the central shaping reality in poor African American communities.  The almost universal failure of Americans to grasp this basic concept frustrates productive debate. 

Liberals have a solid grasp of the tail of racism and conservatives have a strangle hold on the trunk of personal responsibility.  But the elephant in the room is economic.  Our musical chairs economy leaves too many people standing when the music stops.  We’ve been sending the losers to prison when  the only workable solution is to find some more chairs.

Once we grasp the dynamics of the prison-shaped community (something conservatives and liberals should be able to agree on) we will be free to talk productively about race and responsibility.