I think its a positive feedback loop. We criminalize blacks, which makes life "harder", which makes crime more attractive, which leads to more crime, which criminalizes blacks...
But there could be a chicken or the egg argument as to which step occurred first in the loop (crime vs criminalization), because blacks didn't make up such a large percentage of prisons until the last few decades.
I think that's lazy thinking. Blacks didn't make up such a large percentage just a few decades ago, so its a recent problem. Fatherless homes, for example, are much more common than before.
Slavery transitioned to Jim Crow which transitioned to Redlining which transitioned to systemic poverty by the 60s-70s. Every thing was nicely set up for the arrival of the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986.
Look at what Nixon's Aid (Ehrlichman) said about Nixon's drug policy. (Excerpt NY Daily News):
The “War on Drugs” was actually a political tool to crush leftist protesters and black people, a former Nixon White House adviser admitted in a decades-old interview published Tuesday.
John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, laid bare the sinister use of his boss’ controversial policy in a 1994 interview with journalist Dan Baum that the writer revisited in a
I don't think so. There's a whole waterfall of cause effect starting from there.
When you deprive a group of people equal opportunities over the span of 200 years, you're bound to develop a culture and community which has grown around the notion that one cannot succeed using standard methods.
Arguably the "egg" is the heroin epidemic that was caused by the Vietnam War. Blacks sought out and eventually won the right to fight for our country alongside white Americans, only to find that coincidentally(?) the nation no longer felt the same pride and sense of responsibility it once had for those who served as members of the armed forces.
Regarding fatherless homes, I don't think one can take for granted which way the arrow goes. Is it fatherlessness --> problems or Problems --> fatherlessness? In other words chicken/egg redux.
Aren't a lot of these people in jail for stupid shit like drug position and there are rules such as 3 strikes and out specifically designed for them? Maybe this fiscal freedom Americans love to talk about and the gun carrying freedom could extend to some other parts of life...
But there could be a chicken or the egg argument as to which step occurred first in the loop (crime vs criminalization), because blacks didn't make up such a large percentage of prisons until the last few decades.