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Child poverty
During the 1980's, child poverty increased by 23%. Today, after almost a decade of economic expansion, the only super power in the world still has about one out of every four children aged five and under living in poverty, according to the National Center for Children and Poverty at Columbia University.1 By comparison, the corresponding child poverty rate is about 15% in Canada, 12% in Japan, 7% in France, 4% in Belgium and 2% in Finland.2 At the new millennium, we have phenomenal prosperity in the United States. Yet the poor are barely better off than in the 1980s, in spite of the economic boom of the 1990s. And the extremely poor are worse off.3
Unemployment
and Underemployment
The federal government currently claims an unemployment rate of about
4%. Yet the Economic Policy Institue in Washington, DC estimates that
the rate of underemployment is about 7.5%--when one takes into account
official unemployment rates, the number of people who have stopped trying
to find jobs and who therefore are not counted, and persons working
part-time who want to work full time. (Much of this under-employment
is associated with temporary jobs that offer few, if any, benefits.)
The United States Department of Labor has concluded, "The employment
rate for out-of-school youth in high-poverty areas typically is less
than 50 percent." The Center for Community Change in Washington,
DC has estimated that the "jobs gaps" is about 4.4 million
jobs nationally. Of that, perhaps half of the jobs needed are in the
inner city.4
Income inequality: The 1980s
During the trickle down, supply side economics that dominated the 1980s in America, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, according to conservative author Kevin Phillips and many others. The working class also got poorer. The middle class stayed about the same, so it lost ground to the rich.5
Income inequality: The 1990s
In the 1990s, the large income gaps of the 1980s actually widened. The incomes of the best off Americans rose twice as fast as those of middle income Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The gap between rich and working income Americans rose even more. Income differences between the haves and the have nots are growing faster in America than in any industrialized democracy. In countries where reliable information exists, the United States is second only to Russia in having the smallest middle class and the highest poverty rates.6
Wealth inequality
The increase in wealth inequality during the 1980s was virtually unprecedented. The only comparable period in America in the twentieth century was 1922-1929, before the Great Depression. During the 1980s, 99% of the wealth gained went to the top 20% of wealth holders in America -- and the top 10% gained 62% of that. The median wealth of nonwhite American citizens actually fell during the 1980s. The average level of wealth of an African-American family in America today is about one-tenth of an average white family. Wealth inequality is much worse in the United States than in countries traditionally thought of as "class ridden," like the United Kingdom.7
CEO-worker inequality
In 1980, the average corporate CEO earned forty-two times as much as the average worker. In 1998, after the union busting of the 1980s, the average corporate CEO earned 419 times as much as the average worker.8
Resegregation
According to Professor Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Education, America is resegregating in its neighborhoods and schools. Over two thirds of all African American and Hispanic students in urban areas attend predominantly segregated schools. Over two thirds of those cannot achieve minimally acceptable scores on standardized tests.9
Prison building instead of higher education
Today, the states spend more on prison building than on higher education -- whereas ten years ago, the opposite was true.10
Prison building as America's housing policy for the poor
In the 1980s, prison building became our national housing policy for the poor. We more than quadrupled the number of prison cells, at the same time we reduced appropriations for housing the poor at the federal level by over 80%. Today, two million people are incarcerated in America.11
Prison building and race discrimination
In the early 1990s, one out of every four young African-American men
in America was in prison, on probation or on parole at any one time,
according to the Sentencing Project in Washington, DC. Yet today, and
after a Presidential Commission on Race, one out of every three
young African-American men is in prison, on probation or on parole at
any one time in America. In big cities, the number is one out of
every two.12 Similarly, we know from Professor Milton
Friedman, the conservative economist, that the rate of incarceration
of African-American men in America today is four times greater than
the rate of incarceration of black men in pre-Mandela apartheid South
Africa. Nonetheless, the fastest growing group of male prison inmates consiste of Latinos.13
Sentencing and race discrimination
There is deep racial bias in our juvenile justice and criminal justice
system, especially our mandatory minimum sentences when it comes to
drugs. For example, sentences for crack cocaine, used disproportionately
by minorities, are greater than sentences for powder cocaine, used disproportionately
by whites. As a result of these and related practices, America’s
prisons are disproportionately populated by minorities.14
Race discrimination and the prison-industrial complex
At the same time, prison building has become a job generating, economic development policy for rural white Americans -- who now send lobbyists with six figure incomes to Washington to fight for still more prisons, as part of the emerging prison-industrial complex.15
Criminal justice policy is just "running in place"
Yet we know, based on the most prestigious American study of prison building to date, by the National Academy of Science, that the criminal justice response to crime is, at most, "running in place".16
Crime and justice
The final report of the National Violence Commission of 1969 was titled (from the Constitution) To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility. Yet, since that report, racial injustice in the criminal justice system has increased. Income, wage and wealth inequality and injustice also have increased. As for domestic tranquility, in spite of a (welcome) reduction in violent crime of the 1990s, present violent crime and fear are roughly at the same levels as in the late 1960s, even though America has had a seven-fold increase in incarceration.17
Notes and sources
1. National Center for Children in Poverty. Columbia University. Young Children in Poverty, March, 1998.
2. Jeff Faux, "Lifting All Boats," chapter prepared for To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility: (Washington, DC: Milton S. Eisenhower, 1999.)
3. Peter Edelman, "Who Is Worrying About the Children?" Washington Post, August 11, 1999, p. A18.
4. Center for Community Change, Newsletter (Issue 19, Fall 1997);
Federal Register, Volume 64, Number 105, Wednesday June 2, 1999,
p. 29672; Alan Okagaki, Developing a Public Policy Agenda on Jobs
(Washington, D.C.: Center for Community Change, 1997). Jerry Jones, Federal
Revenue Policies That Work: A Blueprint for Job Creation to Support Welfare
Reform (Washington, D.C.: Center for Community Change, 1997). William
Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
(New York: Knopf, 1996). Lawence Mishel, Jared Beunstein and John Schmitt,
The State of Working America (Cornell University Press, 2000)
5. Kevin Phillips, The Politics and Rich and Poor (New York: Random House, 1990). Jason DeParle, "Richer Rich, Poorer Poor, and a Fatter Green Book," New York Times, May 26, 1991; Lynn A. Curtis, Family, Employment and Reconstruction (Milwaukee: Family Service America, 1995); U.S. Census, Historical Poverty Tables (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census, 1997); Children’s Defense Fund, The State of America’s Children (Washington, D.C.: Children’s Defense Fund, 1994); Felicity Baringer, "Rich-Poor Gulf Widens among Blacks, New York Times, Sept. 25, 1992.
6. Doug Henwood, "The Nation Indicators," Nation, March 29, 1999, p. 10. Alan Wolfe, "The New Politics of Inequality," New York Times, September 22, 1999, p. A27.
7. Keith Bradsher, "Gap in Wealth in U.S. Called Widest in West," New York Times, April 17, 1995; Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy (New York: The New Press, 1995); Editorial "The Tide Is Not Lifting Everyone," New York Times, September 30, 1997; and Glenn C. Loury, "Unequalized," New Republic, April 6, 1998.
8. Alan Wolfe, "The New Politics of Inequality," New York Times, September 27, 1999, p. A27.
9. Gary Orfield, "Segregated Housing and School Desegregation," in Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown vs. Board of Education (New York: New Press, 1996).
10. Robert Suro, "More Is Spent on New Prisons Than Colleges," Washington Post, February 24, 1997; and Beatrix Hamburg, "President’s Report," Annual Report, 1996 (New York: William T. Grant Foundation, 1997).
11. John Atlas and Peter Drier, A National Housing Agenda for the 1990s, (Washington, D.C.: National Housing Institute, 1992); Lynn A. Curtis, Family, Employment and Reconstruction; and Sentencing Project, Crime Rates and Incarceration: Are We Any Safer? (Washington, D.C.: Sentencing Project, l992).
12. Mark Mauer, Young Black Men and the Criminal Justice System (Washington, D.C.: Sentencing Project, 1990); Mark Mauer, Intended and Unintended Consequences: State Racial Disparities in Imprisonment (Washington, D.C.: Sentencing Project, 1997); Vivien Stern, The Future of A Sin (Boston; Northeastern University Press, 1998); Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: The Free Press, 1999); and David Cole, No Equal Justice (New York: The New Press, 1999).
13. Milton Freidman, "There’s No Justice in the War on Drugs," New York Times, January 11, 1998.
14. Elliott Currie, Crime and Punishment in America (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 1998); Editorial, "Crack Sentences Revisited,"
Washington Post, May 5, 1997. Fox Butterfield, "Racial Desparities
See As Pervasive in Juvenile Justice", New York Timer, April
26, 2000.
15. James Brooke, "Prisons: Growth Industry for Some," New York Times, November 2, 1997. Also see Steven R. Donziger, The Real War on Crime: Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission (New York: Harper Collins, 1996).
16. Jeffrey A. Roth, "Understanding and Preventing Violence," in Research in Brief (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, 1994); and Richard A. Mendel, Prevention or Pork? A Hard Look at Youth-Oriented Anti-Crime Programs (Washington, D.C.: American Youth Policy Forum, 1995).
17. Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, To Establish Justice, to Insure Domestic Tranquility. A Thirty Year Update of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. (Washington, DC: Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, 1999.)
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