The State of Black America, Part Five: Criminal-Minded – Getting at the Root of Violence and its Prevention

Date: Sunday, January 21, 2007
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com

EDITOR'S NOTE: "Criminal-Minded – Getting at the Root of Violence and its Prevention" is the fifth in BlackAmericaWeb.com's six-part State of Black America series. Coming Tuesday: Post-Katrina recovery in the Gulf.



Crime is a lot like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but few people are sure what to do about it. You can try to prepare for it. Just as you carry an umbrella when rain is predicted, you can try to avoid bad neighborhoods, remain alert to your surroundings and take all the proper precautions. But sometimes, you can’t avoid the storm.

Preliminary statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Statistics report indicate that, overall, violent crime nationally increased 3.7 percent in the first six months of 2006, compared to the first six months of 2005. Violent crime includes murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. After years of steady decline -- a 26.3 percent drop from 1996 through 2005 -- crime appears to be making a bit of a comeback.

In a BlackAmericaWeb.com survey, 60 percent of those polled said they or a family member have been victims of a gun-related crime. Eighty-nine percent want stricter gun laws, 87 percent want gun owners licensed and 76 percent said there should be national gun control legislation.

But experts say the path to crime starts early in ways that few people consider, and that the key to lowering the crime rate requires more than just changing the gun laws.

At a forum in Washington, D.C. last summer on the status of young black men, Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the media center of the Judge Baker Children’s Center, cited a Yale study that showed black children are expelled from preschool at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, particularly black boys.

“Is racial profiling starting at age three or four?” Poussaint said at the time, “or is there something going on before preschool that relates to the family and the community that already is making some of these young black males unable to adapt, unable to fit, on a preschool level?”

The study by Walter Gilliam of the Yale University Child Study Center revealed that black students attending state-funded preschool programs were twice as likely to be expelled as Latino and white children and more than five times as likely to be expelled as Asian-American children.

“Although a pattern of particular risk for expulsion with African-American students has been demonstrated during kindergarten through grade 12, the pattern of disparity appears to begin much earlier,” according to the report.

At the forum and again in a more recent interview, Poussaint pointed to weak parenting skills and “just too much serious corporal punishment.”

Spankings that go too far or beatings “produce anger,” he told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “It’s promoting violence and leads to certifiable child abuse. So these kids become more difficult for the mother to manage.”

Many of these children, Poussaint said, have little or no involvement with their fathers, either because of incarceration, abuse or indifference. Overwhelmed mothers don’t have time to spend with their children because they are working and trying to hold down the fort single-handedly. One problem just leads to another.

“Just having dinner with your kids has positive benefits,” Poussaint said, “but there’s a lot of eating on the run, so most parents are buying fast foods. Then we’ve got the (childhood) obesity. It puts an additional burden on the parents. There are doctor appointments. How do they do these things and work at the same time?”

Efforts to encourage fathers’ involvement and financial support are important, Poussaint said. Additionally, parenting classes would help.

“Frequently, (parents) do things out of a lack of knowledge or ignorance. They just don’t know you shouldn't be yelling at your kid all the time and calling them stupid. They don’t know they should be educating their children from the womb. The kids are going to school and are already behind. Kids do better when they get some fundamental education at home,” Poussaint said.

“In the United States, 2.2 million people are in jail,” said Glenn Ivey, the state’s attorney for Prince George’s County, Md. “We’re either the leader in the world or near the top. But what we’ve learned is incarceration alone is not enough. You have to have intervention and prevention methods.”

Ivey, whose office has worked with law enforcement, schools and community agencies to launch intervention and prevention programs, said it is important to get criminals and firearms off the street, maintaining that that can be done with aggressive but targeted policing and prosecution. However, that must be balanced with programs that steer people away from crime in the first place.

While violent crime began to drop in Prince George’s County last year after a record year of violence in 2005, “we had a spike, and it came down 20 percent last year in homicides," said Ivey, "but we can’t be satisfied. We’re still above the pre-crack, pre-semi-automatic weapons numbers. Homicide is still the leading cause of death for young black males for the past 20 years.

“We spend a lot of time on the death penalty, sentencing disparities and racial profiling, but even if we were to abolish the death penalty tomorrow, it won’t do anything to bring down the homicide rate,” Ivey told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

“We need a return to the basic, moral values that taught people across the board that you’re not supposed to carry guns, and you don’t have to shoot people over the most minor slights. When I was a prosecutor in Washington, D.C. in the early ‘90s, most homicides were over turf disputes among drug dealers. After that settled down, 30 to 40 percent of the homicides became ‘He looked at my girl;’ ‘He dissed me.’ We had (cases of) a fight over a bar stool, road rage.”

Ivey said there are lots of ways to keep young people out of trouble, if they know where to go.

“I’m in favor of direct contact, mentoring and tutoring programs. Let them see adults who have gotten themselves together, who have jobs and have families. The faith community can help, not just with kids in their congregations, but the scattered flock, so to speak, as well. In our community, churches with congregations of 5,000 to 10,000 members are able to do amazing things,” Ivey said.

LISTEN: BAW's Jackie Jones talks with Lorna Green, a crime victim and parent who is active in her community.

“I’m for aggressive prosecution as much as anyone,” Ivey said, “but I’m not for locking everybody up, especially first-time, nonviolent offenders -- especially for drug offenses. I believe in diversion programs and drug treatment.”

A report from the Justice Policy Institute, released in November, said that the pretrial jailing of youth before they are found to be delinquent may contribute to future offences. The report cited studies from around the country that showed “incarcerated youth have higher recidivism rates than youth supervised in other kinds of settings.”

The institute, which studies adult and juvenile justice policies, cited a study conducted by the Wisconsin state legislature that looked at four counties and discovered that 70 percent of the youth sent to detention center were rearrested or returned to detention within a year of their release. A San Francisco diversion program, the report said, found that youth who were given supervision other than detention had half the recidivism rate of those who remained in detention or the juvenile justice system.

Ivey’s office started a program at Fairmount High School in Prince George’s, which had a reputation for low-performing students and a lot of trouble. The results, he said, have been amazing.

“I told them give me 20 of your kids. Not the A students and not all the knuckleheads, just a good mix,” Ivey said. “We started going in and interacting with them. We reached out to the University of Maryland for curricular support, and we worked with the (school’s) administration.”

The students' grades have risen, and they have discovered talents and interests that might have gone untapped without the involvement of adults who, Ivey said, simply showed genuine concern for them.

“The combination of high expectations and ‘Yeah, we care about you’ is a major factor,” Ivey said. “They’re all our kids on some level.”

According to the Dellums Commission report, sponsored by the Health Policy Institute of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and chaired by former congressman and current Oakland, California Mayor Ronald Dellums, a wide range of polices that affect the physical, emotional and social health of young men of color and their communities are tied to the criminal justice problems many young black men face. But more pointedly, the rapid globalization of society has eliminated a number of opportunities that helped earlier generations of young black men stay out of harm’s way.

“Primary among these is economic globalization and its effects at home -- rapid de-industrialization, de-unionization, and a steep decline in jobs and real wages for working-class men of all colors,” the report said.

“The social costs of such policies for families of color have been enormous,” the report said. “Family-supporting jobs disappeared from the urban communities in which people of color remained, isolated in the wake of increasing residential segregation. Where jobs were absent, drugs moved in, with their dangerous but irrepressible economy. Many of the nation’s policy responses served to exacerbate the exclusion of men in the community, particularly mass incarceration and a welfare system that made male participation a liability instead of an asset.”

The report recommended an expansion of youth courts, drug courts and community-based counseling as alternatives to incarceration. It also called for the repeal of mandatory minimum sentences, including disproportionate sentencing for powder and crack cocaine offenses. The commission also urged legislators to consider revising or repealing truth-in-sentencing and three-strike laws, which, the report said, have proven to be ineffective in curbing drug trafficking.

“Legislators make laws; they don’t unmake law,” said Dr. Gail Christopher, director of the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political Studies. “Three strikes and zero tolerance laws haven’t been informed by research but by headlines and political reaction.”

"The disparities in crack and powder cocaine [sentencing] are a gut civics lesson in how difficult it is to undo policy mistakes,” Christopher said. “We were talking about the common barriers we face, but understand we were all in some ways victimized by absent leadership.”

Still, she said, the Dellums commission members are optimistic that their proposals will get some traction now that the Democrats have regained control of Congress.

“We believe this report will have legs in terms of a national policy agenda,” Christopher told BlackAmericaWeb.com, adding that the National League of Cities will work with local leaders, and commission members will work with state leaders, the private sector, labor unions and associations, including the National Education Association, as well.

“We have to take our America back, and we have to begin with our young men of color,” Christopher said. “We understand that it is a long-term objective. If we can be the bearers of good news and lift up success stories, I think it will reach a tipping point.”

But for many people, the experts’ discussions are good ideas for the long haul, but don’t address the immediate impact of crime.

Lorna Green, a married mother of two from Landover, Md., was carjacked three years ago at a shopping center in Oxon Hill, Md. She was not harmed, and her car was later recovered, but it brought home the issue of guns and violence in an intimate way.

“This just confirmed my feeling that (guns) are readily too available for people who don’t need to have handguns,” Green told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

“We do live in a neighborhood that has a fair amount of gun violence,” Green said of her Kentland neighborhood in Landover, which is not far from FedEx Field, home to the NFL’s Washingon Redskins.

Asked what she and her husband told their sons, ages 22 and 19, over the years to keep them safe, Green said, “We try to tell them not to hang out on the street. When you’re outside, know who you’re talking to. When you see trouble, come inside or get to safety.”

Active in community organizations, Green said the county police occasionally increase their presence in the neighborhood, but it is not consistent.

“The activity that breeds the crime still goes on,” Green said. “A lot of times, the police don’t make the arrests” or when they do, the suspects quickly make bail and are back on the street.

Green said “weed and seed” programs, in which criminals are weeded from the streets and programs to give young people alternatives to crime have been launched in her community, but, again, funding and support from county officials have been inconsistent.

“We’re doing a lot on the weed side, but not on the seed side,” she said.

Green said there are a number of programs for very young children, but not enough for the 12 to 17 year olds who are most likely to get into trouble.

“They need to have things to do, structured activities,” Green said. Yet, activities such as 4-H camps that are available in her community and are funded in whole or in part by the civic association and the recreation council have sometimes gone begging because the association cannot get parents to sign up their children or simply sign permission slips.

“They don’t have that buffer from someone else to help,” Green said.

“Getting to that is something we need to do,” Ivey said, adding that it would take the wider community, parents, community groups, the faith community and government to provide the resources to make a difference in crime rates -- and the number of those incarcerated.

Ultimately, Ivey said, young people need to realize “working 9-to-5 is better than serving 5-to-10.”

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