2008's Ten Worst Places to Be Black

Corporate media, which conceal much about the state of things beyond our borders, work hard to obscure the facts of life for Americans too, including the state of black America. In this year of symbolic firsts and "never befores" Black Agenda Report offers a useful index of how life is lived for hundreds of thousands of families in our communities.

America's prison system, the world's largest, houses some 2.2 million people. Almost half its prisoners come from the one-eighth of this country, which is black. African-American communities have been hard hit by the social, political and economic repercussions of the growth of America's prison state. Its presence and its reach into black life is a useful index of the quality of life in black America itself.

In this year of symbolic optimism, when a black man is a leading contender in the presidential race, as well as a leading recipient of contributions from Wall Street, big insurance and military contractors, the need to measure and describe life as it is actually lived by millions of African-Americans has never been greater. As we said in the introduction to 2005's Ten Worst Places to Be Black.

The pervasive corporate media bubble, which grossly distorts the views most Americans have of the world beyond their shores, and of life in America's black one-eighth, operates to fool African-Americans, too. While a fortunate few of us are doing very well indeed, and many more are hanging on as best we can, the conditions of life for a substantial chunk of black America are not substantially improving, and appear to be getting much worse. This is a truth which can't be found anywhere in the corporate media, but it is nevertheless one with which we must familiarize ourselves in preparation for the upcoming national black dialog. It is high time to begin constructing useful indices with which to measure the quality of life, not just for a fortunate few, but for the broad masses of our people in America's black one-eighth.

Painting an accurate picture is not difficult. Useful measures of family income and cohesiveness, of home ownership, life expectancy, education levels, of unemployment and underemployment abound. But among all the relevant data on the state of black America today, one factor stands out: the growth of America's public policy of racially selective policing, prosecution and mass imprisonment of its black citizens over the past 30 years. The operation of the crime-control industry has left a distinctive, multidimensional and devastating mark on the lives of millions of black families, and on the economic and social fabric of the communities in which they live.

Although our black presidential candidate would have us believe that African-Americans are, as he has said many times, "90 percent of the way" to freedom, justice and true equality, the facts seem to say otherwise. As recently as 1964, a majority of all U.S. prisoners were white men. But since 1988, the year Vice President George H.W. Bush rode to the White House, stoking white fears with an ad campaign featuring convicted black killer and rapist Willie Horton, the black one-eighth of America's population has furnished the majority of new admissions to its prisons and jails.

The fact is that while U.S. prison populations have grown seven times since 1970, crime rates have increased only slightly over that time. According to Berkeley scholar Dr. Loic Wacquant, the increase in America's prison population over that time has been achieved simply by locking up five times as many people per one thousand reported crimes as we did in 1980.

The ripple effects on black communities and families have been enormous and devastating. Millions of the black poor are permanently stigmatized, excluded from much of the job market and opportunities for training and education, and are sent home to the same resource-poor, deindustrialized communities in which they lived before prison, where there are no services for them and no societal will to educate or train them. America's enormous prison system, along with its punitive and exclusionary attitude toward the class of people from which prisoners originate, is freezing the black poor in place for generations to come. As we said in 2005,