Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris

Author:Malcolm Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Social Science / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, History / United States / 21st Century, Business & Economics / Economic History, Business & Economics / Labor
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

If we assume that the missing cases are at least as likely to have been arrested as the observed cases, the in-sample age-23 prevalence rate must lie between 30.2 percent and 41.4 percent. The greatest growth in the cumulative prevalence of arrest occurs during late adolescence and the period of early or emerging adulthood.48

Along with other kinds of youth labor, dignity work has grown. It’s harder now for kids to stay clear of the law. All of the trends in school discipline (increasingly arbitrary, increasingly racist, and just plain increasing) play out the same way at the young adult level. There are many explanations for the rise of American mass incarceration—the drug war, more aggressive prosecutors, the 1990s crime boom triggering a prison boom that started growing all on its own, a tough-on-crime rhetorical arms race among politicians, the rationalization of police work—and a lot of them can be true at the same time. But whatever the reasons, the US incarceration rate has quintupled since the 1970s, and it’s affecting young black men most of all and more disproportionately than ever. The white rate of imprisonment has risen in relative terms, but not as fast as the black rate, which has spiked. The ratio between black and white incarceration increased more between 1975 and 2000 than in the fifty years preceding.49 Considering the progressive story about the arc of racial justice, this is a crushing truth.

Mass incarceration, at least as much as rationalization or technological improvement, is a defining aspect of contemporary American society. In her bestselling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, law professor Michelle Alexander gives a chilling description of where we are as a nation:

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