Black Men and Justice System

Brown’s commentary reflects a lack of insight into the American dilemma. He wittingly or unwittingly glorified our notorious prisons and jails, which are overcrowded and punish rather than rehabilitate--though the Nation of Islam has proven that rehabilitation is possible. Though Brown does seem cognizant of the failure of ghetto schools and the revolving jailhouse door, it’s doubtful that black American criminals seek to be taken out of circulation just to have food, shelter and “entertainment.” They are rather violent places, in the form of everything from homosexual rape to murder.

I haven’t read about or met a person yet who wanted to be incarcerated. Even those seeking the big bucks through illegal endeavors don’t want to be caught. When they are captured I believe they would rather work at a low-paying fast-food place than go to a penal facility.

What Brown and other intellectuals should do is investigate the reason for African Americans’ high crime rate. The public certainly doesn’t get it from mainstream journalists. No wonder most members of other ethnic/racial groups feel that “blacks breed crime.” Why is the plight of black Americans worse today than it was in the 1960s and early 1970s--the era of the civil rights struggle, desegregation, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the “black is beautiful” fad, political empowerment, blacks moving into more prestigious positions in this country than ever before, etc.

A poor education, poverty, and even foreign-style racism do not seem to produce the same results for blacks and part-blacks in other parts of the world. Some years back, a police official in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, told me that violent crime does not plague his country like it does the United States, and most policemen in the former British West Indies don’t or didn’t carry firearms and are rarely killed or wounded.

Most crime by foreign blacks appears to be related to ideological, religious, political and tribal differences. Why do white Americans commit a higher percentage of violent crime than Asian Americans? Why are men more violence prone than women? This is a fertile field for social scientific inquiry. Conservatives obviously don’t have the answers.

SHELBY SANKORE

Phillips Ranch