Bill Byrnes on law enforcement and the black middle class

Criminal justice policies that result in large-scale incarceration of young black men have spillover effects throughout the black population, middle class as well as poor, according to new research by Bill Byrnes of the Center for Research and Learning presented at one of the Center's Friday morning seminars last month. Byrnes's talk was entitled "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Black Middle Class and Mass Incarceration." My fellow middle-aged white men who can't understand what Colin Kapernick and the kneeling NFL players are on about would do well to draw near and give heed.

Byrnes's Ph.D. research is based on focus group interviews with blacks and whites in suburban Cook County, Illinois (the county that includes Chicago) concerning friends and family members who have been incarcerated as well as their own experiences with the police. It builds on existing research that traces dramatic increases in prison populations nationwide after 1978 not only to increases in violent crime from the late 1960s to the early 1990s but also the effects of de-industrialization, public calls for more policing, federal wars on crime and drugs, longer sentences and stricter parole rules. The United States already had imprisoned a greater percentage of its population than other advanced democracies, but now the discrepancy is huge. Moreover, it disproportionately affects people by social class, neighborhood and particularly race: in Cook County, blacks comprise 24.8 percent of the total population but 66.9 percent of the prison population.

Bill Byrnes (Source: Center for Urban Research and Learning)

Byrnes's focus groups revealed that both blacks and whites suffer emotionally when friends and family members are incarcerated, but whites "seem on the whole better cushioned." Blacks are more likely than whites to know someone who has been incarcerated; to bear financial burdens for family members in jail; and to themselves have had some negative encounters with police. Byrnes's middle class black respondents "have to negotiate their safety in public spaces in ways whites don't have to," relying on extremely proper demeanor and professional clothing to get them through situations (although that doesn't always help, as witness the 2016 killing of Philando Castile in suburban Minneapolis).

Byrnes concludes that "mass incarceration is about resource allocation," redolent of Harold Lasswell's definition of politics as who gets what, when and how. Blacks and whites start from different social places, and their interactions with the state "are not equivalent." This not only puts an "unjust" burden on the poor--greater police presence means more incarceration and afterwards higher unemployment, persistent poverty, and lack of access to education and housing--but extends those burdens to the nascent black middle class, whose economic position does not insulate them from incarceration of friends and family, or from their own awkward interactions with police.

Why should this matter to people who aren't black? Byrnes cites three reasons:

1. The economic costs of mass incarceration diverts state resources from other programs. "Million dollar block" is an expression for a neighborhood where the state is spending over a million dollars incarcerating its residents. "Do you want to know why it costs $40,000 to go to U[niversity] of I[llinois] now?" Byrnes asked rhetorically. He could have added: Or why we struggle to maintain transportation infrastructure or fund schools or treat the mentally ill? 
2. Mass incarceration may endanger public safety as much or more as it protects it. Where areas of concentrated poverty are also areas of concentrated ex-inmates, the lack of economic opportunity as well as ongoing encounters with law enforcement breed desperation, which actually increases the likelihood of crime.
3. Democracy itself is compromised by a policy approach layered on top of existing social and economic inequalities that creates "two-track citizenship" defined to a large extent by race. To this I would add that the era of economic mobility in America ended about 1973, just as black civil rights were beginning to be protected. The subsequent economic arrangements have frozen in place a wealth and opportunity gap that for historical reasons favored whites. The current House and Senate tax reform efforts, most egregiously the proposed end of the inheritance tax but going beyond that in many ways, can only add to the problem.

I will add a fourth reason. It has been a core assumption since the beginning of this blog project that we will not in the coming century be able to live as separately as we have been doing for the last 75 years. Whites are going to figure out how to live with blacks, and vice versa, and policy approaches that reinforce and extend racial inequalities are making that very very difficult.

SEE ALSO:
'The Latest Bad News and Our Common Life," 17 December 2014. For more from Holy Mountain, please choose "race" from the list of labels in the right-hand column.


Ta-Nahesi Coates's essay, "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 2015, is reprinted along with his own commentary/update as chapter 7 of his We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New World, 2017). It is particularly useful for his copious citation of sources. Coates was interviewed by Krista Tippett at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and that is here.

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2012)
Charles Marohn, "It's Time to End the Routine Traffic Stop," Strong Towns, 31 October 2017