A New York Times article on Thursday reported a Pew Center study. The article begins
For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.
Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.
Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups.
- One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006.
- One in 15 black adults is, too, as is
- one in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34.
The report... found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that one in 100 black women are.
The word "poverty" does not appear in the NYT article or in the study report, but the reader knows it is a factor.
Another article, in this Sunday's NYT magazine, Teaching Boys and Girls Separately, might point us toward a part of the explanation for what we're seeing:
While there’s some dispute over whether there’s an ongoing education crisis for white, middle-class boys, there’s no doubt that public schools are failing poor minority students in general and poor minority boys in particular. Despite six years of No Child Left Behind, the achievement gaps between rich and poor students and white and black students have not significantly narrowed. “People are getting desperate” is how Benjamin Wright, chief administrative officer for the Nashville public schools, described the current interest in single-sex education to me. “Coed’s not working. Time to try something else.”
Wright was one of the first principals in the country to address the racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps by separating boys from girls. In 1999, he was sent to the failing Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, in Seattle, to try to turn the place around. One of the first things he noticed was that three boys were getting suspended for every girl, “and for the most ridiculous things in the world — a boy would burp, or he’d pass gas, or a girl would say, ‘He hit me.’ ” Nationwide, boys are nearly twice as likely as girls to be suspended, and more likely to drop out of high school than girls (65 percent of boys complete high school in four years; 72 percent of girls do). Boys make up two-thirds of special-education students. They are 1.5 times more likely to be held back a grade and 2.5 times more likely to be given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. So Wright met with his fourth-grade teachers and recalls telling them, “O.K., here’s what we’re going to do: how about you take all the boys and you take all the girls?” Wright says that in 2001, after Marshall’s first year in a single-sex format, the percentage of boys meeting the state’s academic standards rose from 10 percent to 35 percent in math and 10 percent to 53 percent in reading and writing.
Shifting gears a bit, I've been exploring the NYT free archives -- articles from before about 1925 -- and came across this, from February 24, 1885. It is an account of a speech given the night before in Brooklyn.
The Panacea for Poverty
Henry George on the Social Revolution That He Expects
New York Times, February 24, 1885Mr. Henry George lectured in the Brooklyn Academy of Music last evening, to an audience which filled the orchestra seats and half filled the seats in the balcony and dress circle, on the subject of "The Crime of Poverty." Mr. George said that he insisted that poverty was a crime. It was the poor who filled our jails. They had in New Jersey six rich men who were in jail, but these were exceptional cases, and they were getting up petitions to have them released. All over the world poverty was what men mostly feared. Temples were erected all over the civilized world to the living God, but really the devil that most men feared was the devil of want, and the hell which most men feared was the hell of poverty.
"Poverty," said Mr. George, "does not necessarily mean intemperance and vice. Nothing is more false than that poverty is the result of intemperance and vice. And yet nothing is truer than that this ought to be so. It ought to be that only the intemperate and vicious should be poor. The Creator decreed that poverty should only come from idleness and vice, and nothing shows that nature has lost her hold in this world so forcibly as the fact that industry does not command wealth. All over the civilized world it is not the man who works the hardest in producing wealth that becomes rich. The whole question whether poverty is a crime turned on the question of whether we must have poverty. If poverty is not a necessity, then it is not a crime. But what can be more certain than that poverty is not a necessity? In the very infancy of the arts the natural bread winner could sustain himself and his family. He could provide bread and meat for his family. In every direction as man's wants increased his power of producing food for himself increased. And yet man today in New York and London, where wealth concentrates, is in want of food. No such poverty as exists there exists in nature. There is want in nature, but there is no such thing in nature as starvation in the midst of abounding wealth."
Mr. George said that the trouble today was not overproduction; it was unjust distribution. The most dangerous men today, he said, were not the Nihilists; they were the men who said, "This will do today; we can wait for tomorrow." Poverty demands for its cure something greater than alms. It demands justice. The power is in the hands of the poor, and they cannot throw the responsibility upon the rich. "What the poor have to do," said Mr. George, "is to seek the cause of this trouble, and then demand the remedy. It will not do to seek violent measures until every other method has failed. The other methods will not fail when the poor stand to the front and seek the cause of their trouble.
"So long as the land is the property of a class," the speaker said, "it is not in the province of the Almighty to prevent poverty. Just so long, then, will we want in the midst of plenty. If we are all born to the same right, if we have equal rights to life, then we must have right to land, which was given to us by the Creator, who created us and the land. But, it will be said, you can't divide up the land. I don't know of any sensible man who would suggest such a thing. But it would not be impracticable to divide up its income. Begin, if needs be, by shifting the taxes on to the value of land. The effect would be in the first place to give an enormous and increasing fund to public use. By taking this revenue coming from the land we should not only have enough to pay the expense of Government, but also enough to give every man, when he came to a certain age, a pension large enough to keep him comfortably the rest of his life."
The speaker said that he asked his audience simply to think for themselves. He believed if his hearers would think earnestly on the subject, they would see that the cause of poverty was simply the fact that men were denied their birthright. On the other side of the ocean, he said, the cry for land for the people had been raised, and he believed it would soon begin here. The great social revolution, he thought, had already begun in this country, which, by peaceful or warlike means, would aid in carrying out the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
What has changed in 123 years? How many of us struggle to pay our mortgages or to pay our rent, and are also burdened by other taxes -- sales taxes of 11% in Alabama, of over 10% in Chicago; local wage taxes; federal and state income taxes? Housing costs are absorbing a larger and larger share of our wages. Add to that the commuting costs to get from homes we thought we could afford to work which pays better wages than most of us can earn in the towns in which we can afford to live. As a December, 2007 NYT article on commuting put it,
Our chosen daily pilgrimages are based on a complicated algorithm that relates distance from home to quality of home. It’s a math problem that each of us must puzzle out at some point.
“The farther out, the more land you get for the same price — or for the same square footage, you pay less,” said John Reinhardt, president and chief executive of Fillmore Real Estate, based in Brooklyn, which specializes in the areas outside Manhattan. “You can either afford more or get more. You can get a house in Marine Park for $500,000, and in Park Slope the same square footage is a million. But different people would prefer it and have the backyard and the pool and commute with a car.”
This relationship between transit and real estate patterns is so visible in New York because of the high number of people who travel into the city from the surrounding boroughs and suburbs.
Ah, well, this post has gone from crime, to education, to poverty, to financing government, to land values, and commutes. The connections are critical, and I will continue to make the case for the connections as I continue this blog.
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