Families, Neighborhoods and Community Leaders Struggle to Cope With Loss of So Many Young Black Men to Jail : A Bleak Cycle

In California, one in three African-American men in their 20s is either in prison, on parole or on probation.

Though alarming in themselves, these statistics tell only half the story.

Ex-convicts do not live isolated lives. Some are fathers and husbands. Some care for aging parents or play basketball with the kid next door.

If their own lives are forever changed by their jail time, so too are the lives of those they leave behind. The circle of tragedy spirals far wider than the men--ensnaring their families, their friends and a community that has come to see crime and punishment as a grimly mundane part of daily life.

Sons grow up without fathers. Younger brothers grow up without role models. Women raise children and run households alone, struggling to maintain a semblance of family through long-distance calls and sporadic visits in noisy prison waiting rooms.

In some areas of Los Angeles--where the roots of hopelessness run deep and life is lived precariously close to the edge--young people know so many men in jail that for some incarceration may seem almost inevitable.

So much so that jail time has almost become a test of manhood in some communities, social workers say, and for some young men, the madness and uncertainty of life outside can make prison seem a false haven. Even for those young men who escape this bleak cycle--and the vast majority do--the numbers are stigmatizing, feeding stereotypically negative images of black males.

For the community, the loss of so many men in their prime raises serious concerns about the future of Black America.

And for the men themselves, especially those who try to rebuild their lives after jail, the legacy of incarceration is a silent force that lasts long after their sentences end.

Some ex-convicts find it hard to fit back into families that have learned to get along without them, and many will discover that finding a job is made much more difficult because of the label: “Ex-con.”

“When those people on those (job) applications ask you if you’ve been convicted of a felony, that one question lets them know what they want to know,” says Kevin Reynolds of Venice, who served several sentences for drug offenses. “They make their determination right there. And then being black too? You can forget it. That conviction. That jail record. You can forget it.”

“It follows you for the rest of your life,” says Kwasi Geiggar, a placement counselor with the Los Angeles Unified School District. “It’s enslaving a whole lot of brothers to a life of professional crime.”

Children at High Risk

Often, the same strike of the gavel that sends fathers to faraway places can spell doom for their children, setting them up to follow in their father’s footsteps.

“Children of (incarcerated men) are at a very high risk of becoming offenders,” says Mary Weaver, who heads Friends Outside, an organization that assists inmates and their families.

“One in two children in the juvenile justice system has a parent who’s incarcerated. If you let these kids’ needs continue to be unaddressed, you are almost guaranteeing that a large number are going to end up being criminals.”

Despite an explosion in the U.S. prison population over the last decade--from 329,000 to more than 770,000--there has been little research on the psychological reactions or adjustments of the children of inmates.

But one trip to a prison visiting room, watching a father try to cram four months of discipline into 30 minutes with his son, shows what families who live this existence already know:

“It has an effect on everybody,” says Adwoa Nyamekye, a Southwest Los Angeles woman who heads a support group for parents whose children are in jail. “The prison waiting room is always full of black women, Latino women, and babies. Everybody is frustrated. Everybody is agitated.”

Nyamekye has spent her share of time in visiting rooms and in courtrooms. Her 21-year-old son, Hassan, is serving a 20-year sentence in state prison for a rape she believes he did not commit.

Her daughter, who was 13 when Hassan was imprisoned three years ago, ran through a gamut of feelings, from defiance--”not going to school, hanging out, just a very angry kid”--to trying to grow up overnight to assume his role in the household.

Counselors who work with the families of inmates say those reactions are not uncommon among children, who must struggle to come to grips with a reordered family life, absent fathers and brothers and the emotional and financial toll that incarceration exacts on those left behind.

When a father, or sometimes a son, is jailed, families lose any financial support they may have received from him. They must stretch often thin budgets to accommodate the costs of long-distance calls and prison visits.

Younger boys see their example and, in the absence of other models, sometimes pattern themselves after their older, jailed peers.

In some parts of Los Angeles, where nearly every teen-ager seems to know someone who has gone to prison, many accept the fact that they too may go. For them, the stigma associated with incarceration does not exist.

At 17, Malik has been in and out of juvenile halls, probation camps and group homes so often that they have lost their mystery--and their power to frighten.

“Once you go to jail you know how it is . . .,” he says. “It’s just jail. You be in there with a lot of people from your neighborhood. You see everybody you went to school with. It’s like, ‘What’s up, homey? What you in here for?’ ”

There are fights--mostly over “stupid stuff” like sweat shirts and cookies and sometimes gang rivalries carried over from the streets--but the random violence that teen-agers live with on the outside does not exist behind the walls of juvenile hall.

And sometimes safety alone makes the loss of freedom seem a fair trade.

Probation officer Juanita Pinion cannot forget the 16-year-old who asked to be sent back to juvenile hall. He offered no reason for his request, and Pinion explained she couldn’t simply send him back, but would meet with him to talk about what was on his mind.

A week later the boy was dead, shot in the head as he walked across the campus of Manual Arts High School in South-Central Los Angeles.

“He knew somebody was after him, that’s why he wanted to be locked up,” says Pinion, who now works at Crenshaw High School.

Malik’s right forearm is tattooed with a tombstone. His two older brothers and a cousin were all killed in gang violence. The teen-ager was asleep in his bedroom when gang members stuck the barrel of a gun through a window and shot his 16-year-old brother as he lay on the couch.

“I slept through it. I didn’t hear no gunshot or nothing. . . . I walked in the living room I saw him on the couch, brains and blood all over the couch. My mother was holding him and I was 11 and it was tripping me out.”

In the face of this kind of violence, Pinion and others say, the penal system is no longer able to scare men and boys away from crime.

“In the area I live in, people go to jail every day, come right back out doing the same thing, ‘killin’ people, gang bangin’, robbing people, whatever it takes to make your money,” says 14-year-old Marcus, who grew up in Watts but lives in a Gardena group home.

And in the absence of traditional measures of manhood--a successful career, financial stability--jail has become a kind of measure of a young man’s status in the streets.

“You have to be violent, have sex, have money and have gone to jail. If you can go to jail and make it through you’re a real man,” says social worker Marilyn Marigna, who focuses her work on black families and children.

As awareness of the problem grows, the issue has taken on a new urgency in the black community, as religious leaders, grass-roots activists and business people mount campaigns, rooted in concern that the future of Black America is imperiled.

Historically, black religious groups--from the Nation of Islam to larger Christian denominations--have tried to help, providing support to inmates’ families, visiting and writing to inmates, and sponsoring job training and education programs for ex-cons. And some parents, like Nyamekye, have formed their own support groups to counteract the effects on their families and to better advocate for their imprisoned children.

Overwhelmed and intimated by the massiveness of the system and its power, family members often don’t understand the system or their rights within it, Nyamekye says.

Others may be bitter and angry, believing their child has been unfairly treated. “As parents, sometimes we get frustrated and throw our hands up,” Nyamekye says. “We don’t understand that we should never give up because the moment we give up the energy is spread everywhere and they feel it and they’ve already given up on themselves so if we give up what do they have?”

One of the most successful community-based efforts is former football star Jim Brown’s Amer-I-Can program, which has helped to turn hundreds of gang members and ex-convicts away from crime by offering courses in life management skills to thousands of inmates in 14 California prisons.

And many groups are trying to reach black boys before they get caught up in the gang and drug activity that can lead to prison. Through mentoring programs, boys are paired with successful men from the community.

Still, the number of black inmates continues to grow (they make up 33% of the state prison population in 1992, according to a report released by the California Commission on the Status of African-American Males). These numbers compound the misery for a community under siege from a variety of forces.

The drug epidemic, skyrocketing unemployment and homelessness combine with the high rate of imprisonment to draw a frightening picture of the future for black families.

The commission report notes that “the institutionalization of young males in their most productive years perpetuates poverty in the African-American culture.”

At women’s conferences and in living rooms across South Los Angeles, there are discussions on the dwindling pool of eligible black men--caused in part by the drug epidemic and the incarceration rate--leading black women to build lives without men.

“With so many black men being given arrest records, it’s very difficult for us to acquire positions where you can offer . . . a woman stability and ability to grow,” says one ex-con, who is married with children. “Black women are very limited in their choices.”

There are also less obvious effects on relatives who must now “carry the extra load,” says Na’im Akbar, a clinical psychologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and author of the book “Visions for Black Men.”

“Everybody always talks about the single mothers . . . but they never talk about the mothers who don’t have sons to care for them in old age, they don’t talk about the (absent) uncles, about all of those relationships that men tie into that suffer by their absence,” Akbar says.

The cycle has also raised serious questions, scholars say, about the community’s ability to provide its young people with skills that have traditionally been needed to survive in America--responsibility, respect, self-esteem, perseverance--or with a sense of their own cultural heritage.

“The most painful deficiency we have in missing all these brothers who are incarcerated is manpower. Those are the resources that would help us help ourselves economically, politically, physically, the manpower for educating and disciplining the young boys . . . all the things that we need are lacking because we don’t have this critical mass of literal manpower,” Akbar contends.

Akbar argues that in the nation’s inner cities, black men are being groomed to end up in prison, just as other communities groom young men to enter Harvard or Yale.

In prisons and jails, men learn how to be men from “inadequate teachers”--from those who have already failed to survive on the outside, he says.

The vast majority of young African-American men do not wind up in jail, but many of them also feel the impact of the high incarceration rate. Even high achievers--the student body presidents and A students--find themselves stigmatized by the statistics.

“People outside the community take that information . . . and they apply it across the board to all African-Americans,” says Derek Wilson of the Institute For the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture in Oakland. “No matter where you come from. It doesn’t matter if you go to college and you graduate.”

Like others, Wilson knows the numbers are alarming but he also cites the flip side: “Three out of every four African-American males are not involved in negative activities,” he says. “We tend to show negative statistics . . . and that has really affected our whole outlook in what we are destined to become.”

But even as the African-American community searches for ways to reverse the trend and the negative stereotypes, many, like counselor Geiggar, say the problem is not theirs alone.

The dilemma facing the black community reflects “what society has come to that we’re producing a large number of people who have to do illegal things to survive,” Geiggar says.

“Until we began to view the problem as everybody’s problem, and not just ‘their problem’ we’re going to continue as a society to suffer from it.”

Starting Over

Sitting at the kitchen table of his sparsely furnished home in Compton, Maurice Dillard smokes a cigarette and sorts through pieces of his past.

“Here I am at the age of 36 and I had 17, 18 years out of my life behind bars. Crime (has) been the only way of life for me for so long, I used to be afraid of changing. What if I’m not good at nothing else?”

Dillard says he’s turned his life around, working as an Amer-I-Can counselor, but the road out was tough. He was 21, living the “gangsta life,” when he landed in jail after he killed a man on a street in South Los Angeles.

“I sold this dude some PCP on consignment. Some kind of way the money got messed up. . . . He pulled a gun, talked crazy and then he got hostile. I didn’t know I was a killer at the time, but I shot him and I killed him.”

Dillard was released after serving 8 1/2 years at San Quentin and Folsom. Once free, he did what many other ex-convicts do: Searched for a way to survive.

Dillard did not tell prospective employers about his prison record and found work as a custodian at an aerospace company. Then a background check revealed his conviction and the company fired him. He turned to dealing drugs, got caught and was sent back to prison for a year.

Studies show that ex-convicts who are able to find employment are “less likely to get into trouble again,” says Jerry DiMaggio, regional administrator for the state parole department. But only about half of those paroled from prison each year in California find jobs, he says.

Even before they were incarcerated, many were not good job prospects. Nationwide, only one-third of those imprisoned had full-time jobs when they were arrested. Only 38% were high school graduates. And 40% were unable to read.

Some say that prison vocational programs are limited and not always effective, and the jobs that are available are often “make work.”

“Locking them up in prison for years without improving them academically and making them employable . . . is not helping the process at all,” says Patricia Khan, a supervising parole agent with the California Youth Authority. “All you can do is come out and re-offend. What else can you do?”

In California, 60% of all state parolees end up returning to prison--either for violating parole or for committing new offenses--and more inmates are serving time for drug-related crimes than for any other single offense.

“The only way we saw of making a living was selling dope, which compounds the problems of the community tenfold,” says Dillard, who now speaks on life planning to students at Locke High School, through a program sponsored by Amer-I-Can.

“It’s like self-defeating, because how can you prosper when your community is devastated?”