As riots in Ferguson and Baltimore heated up this past winter and spring, so did denunciations of a criminal-justice system that has placed a disproportionate number of black men behind bars. One widely aired theory holds that not only are racial disparities and mass incarceration patently unjust on their own terms, but they also lead to chaos in poor urban families. Black men’s absence “disrupts family formation, leading both to lower marriage rates and higher rates of childbirth outside marriage,” pronounced a widely discussed New York Times article, “1.5 Million Missing Black Men.” Hillary Clinton auditioned the theory in the first policy speech of her presidential campaign. “When we talk about one and a half million missing African-American men,” she said at Columbia University in April, “we’re talking about missing husbands, missing fathers, missing brothers.”
The missing-men theory of family breakdown has the virtue of being easy to grasp: men who are locked up are obviously not going to be either desirable husbands or engaged fathers. It also bypasses thorny and deadlocked debates about economics and culture. Still, it has a big problem: it’s at odds with the facts.
Source: Did Mass Incarceration Destroy the Black Family? | City Journal