When Daddy Is Dragged to Prison
March 5, 2015
THE extraordinarily high number of American children with parents in prison is explored in this review of a new book on the subject.
This sad phenomenon is overwhelmingly due to high rates of black crime. Black children of prisoners outnumber whites by almost two to one. Children of black college-educated fathers are twice as likely to have a father in prison than children of white high school dropouts.
According to sociologist Lisa Wade, white racism, not the criminal mentality of blacks, is to blame for these incarceration rates:
After the Emancipation Proclamation, Jim Crow hung like a weight around the shoulders of the parents of black and brown children. After Jim Crow, the GI Bill and residential redlining strangled their chances to build wealth that they could pass down. The mass incarceration boom is just another in a long history of state policies that target black and brown people — and their children — severely inhibiting their life chances.
