Family: The most cherished of American institutions

When evaluating the effects of incarceration on our society, we might begin with its impact on the most cherished of American institutions: the family. The unjust law enforcement policies that result in incarcerating people of color at an exponentially higher rate than their white fellow citizens has resulted in the disintegration of the very structure that “tough on crime” advocates claim is so central to developing productive citizens.

Today, one in three black men will be in prison or jail at some point in their lives, leaving many families without fathers, both as income providers and as role models. The increased financial strain on those families leads to myriad collateral consequences, such as missed opportunities to continue education, poor health and nutrition, and more that impact both their perception of themselves and reinforce the American stereotypes that are misinforming our public policies. Children who grow up in these environments often feel pressure – both from inside their communities, and - in the form of negative and systematized expectations – outside their communities – to commit crime.  Research from the Urban Institute indicates that nearly 2 million children in this country currently have at least one parent incarcerated, often leading to long-term emotional and behavioral challenges. When we incarcerate parents for being too poor to pay child support or court fees, we’ve made a deliberate choice to interrupt that family’s well-being. The injury is not only borne by the incarcerated, but by their families, communities and indeed the entire country. Without a major shift in strategy, America will continue to erode the welfare of families and in the process public safety and the integrity of the rule of law as well.

Yet in spite of all the research and subsequent advocacy efforts, significant and widespread reform in our criminal justice arena continues to move at a glacial pace.  In fact, recent success notwithstanding, our system continues to operate at full throttle, consuming individuals, families and entire communities in its wake.

The results are predictable bouts of social and economic suffering, and at times unsurprising explosions of outrage such as the recent uprisings in Baltimore. What goes unmentioned is that while the mainstream commentary focuses on the alleged pathology of black men as perpetrators in all of our nation’s Baltimore, we’ve ignored that black men are monstrously overrepresented amongst the injured parties in our country. This creates an inevitable tangle of victims and perpetrators that our current penal arrangements are demonstrably ill-equipped to address. This cycle often occurs within a larger context of structural inequity, poverty, and disenfranchisement that greatly reduces their odds of success. Where does victimhood end and criminal culpability begin? Anyone who claims at the initiation of crime must apply the same standard to the state they’ve entrusted with their protection. Surely, if we can expect individuals to hold themselves to high moral standards in the face of well-documented police brutality and social neglect, we can expect the same of the world’s most powerful institutions.

 We can begin that reckoning with the plain truth: ours is an expensive and ineffective criminal justice system that’s become our knee-jerk response to social calamity. There’s a long history of categorically denying black families access to the labor market and the protections of citizenship and then throwing the full force of the state at them when they fail to overcome the problems that we create. Institutions of punishment have long served as surrogates for access to community-based mental health and drug treatment, job training and placement, quality education, and affordable healthcare. If we take seriously the integrity of the family, we’ll end our participation in its decline.

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Glenn E. Martin, Founder & President JustLeadership

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Formerly Incarcerated & Convicted People's Movement Western Regional Conference

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