Incarceration Rates Up in Some Generation Next Groups

"I started noticing that living that lifestyle wasn't taking me where I wanted to go," Hammond recalled. When he realized that his baby brother was out on the street as well, he tried to warn him. "But he wasn't listening to what I said; he was doing what I did."

Hammond landed a job for the first time in years and was on his way home from work when his brother approached him with a proposition.

"He asked me to give him five dimes of crack to make a sale. 'You don't need to be doing this,' I told him. He said he would stop, but I didn't want him making the transaction. So I told him to bring the guy to me. And he sent over undercover cops."

Hammond's younger brother left before either of them realized the mistake they had made. Hammond was arrested and the two haven't spoken since.

Hammond and his brother are part of a generation of young men facing a drastically different reality than that faced by either their middle class peers or generations past.

Generation Next -- those young adults born in the 1980s -- are by and large healthier than their recent predecessors. Compared to the late 1980s when Generation X came of age, drug and alcohol use, teen pregnancy and teen suicide are all down. College entrance and graduations rates are up (particularly for young women), and juvenile delinquency rates for most crimes are down.

Yet, there are segments of Generation Next that are faring far worse.

One out of three black men in this generation will go to jail or prison by the time he is 35 years old, according to Harry Holzer, co-author of "Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men."

"African Americans who do not go to college are having a social experience of young adulthood that is really very different from the rest of American society. What we are seeing now in the incarceration rates of young black men is wholly new. This is really a new generation that is having this very distinctive experience," said Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton University.

Changing times
From 1979 to 1999, the risk of imprisonment for black high school dropouts by the age of 30-34 rose from 17 percent to nearly 59 percent, according Western's calculations. That rate is more than five times what it is for white high school dropouts.

Click here to enlarge image Bruce Western "Punishment & Inequality in America" 2006

According to experts, there are two factors driving this spike in incarceration: changes in the economy and a new national drug control policy.

Over the last 30 years, the U.S. economy has undergone many transformations. Yet, perhaps none have impacted low-income Americans as severely as the erosion of the manufacturing sector. "Good paying blue collar jobs have either withered away or disappeared completely," explained Holzer, who works at the Urban Institute.

According to experts, the decline of manufacturing-based jobs has created massive unemployment in already poor communities, which in turn engendered social problems such as chronic idleness and drug addiction.

At the same time, in the early 1980s, when a crack epidemic exploded in inner cities and began to make national headlines, state and federal authorities began taking an increasingly penal approach to drug use and distribution. Mandatory sentencing regulations were imposed on judges, along with mandatory arrest laws for police officers in certain states.

Black men in poor urban areas have been disproportionately impacted by these policy changes. Although black people account for only 13 percent of drug users, they make up 56 percent of drug prisoners, according to the nonprofit advocacy center, The Sentencing Project.

Growing up on the streets
For a significant segment of 16-25 year olds, the impact of this incarceration surge was first felt indirectly through the imprisonment of family members. Bruce Western of Princeton estimated that at least 20 percent of African Americans born in the 1980s had a parent incarcerated by the time they were 8 years old.

This sharp rise in parental incarceration has contributed to the number of children in this generation growing up in single-parent households. A trend, some experts suggest, that may have impacted the low rate of high school completion in lower-income communities. Currently over half of urban black teens do not finish high school in four years.

Although many experts point to poverty and family structure as the root of this problem, young adults themselves often talk about culture and personal accountability.

Seventeen-year-old Letwan Jackson was born in the housing projects of Portsmith, Va. Despite his family's economic challenges and his father's eventual imprisonment, Jackson claims that he had every opportunity to make better decisions.

"The home I came from was the perfect home. My mom gave me furniture, she fed me, clothed me -- gave me everything I wanted," Jackson said.

Yet, he started getting into trouble at an early age. "When I was 12 years old, I started using marijuana. When I got to high school, I started observing my peers and people older than me. I started doing what they were doing: selling drugs. At first, I started because everybody else was doing it, but later on I realized I was really making money off of it."

According to both experts and first-hand accounts, Jackson 's early introduction to drug trafficking may be part of a larger pattern.

Joe Jones, 50, is a member of the older generation involved in the Baltimore drug trade in the early 1980s. He has since gone on to help other young men and fathers find counseling and job placement, but during his time on the streets, he noticed an interesting phenomenon.

"When I was involved in the drug trade as a user and a seller, it was very difficult for young people to get into that game. It was controlled by adult males, they didn't want to allow us to participate," Jones recalled. Yet, as police officers started to arrest street dealers in greater and greater numbers, the drug trade was faced with a problem familiar to many industries: a high turnover rate.

Despite the War on Drug's stated objective of targeting major drug traffickers, the majority of arrests are for low-level transactions. According to an analysis by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 55 percent of federal drug defendants were street-level dealers or mules, and only 11 percent were classified as high-level distributors in the mid-1990s.

As more and more low-level dealers were incarcerated, more and younger members of poor communities were enticed into the drug trade. "Young men started taking over as the middle men in the street," Jones said.

The Drug Enforcement Agency and the Office of National Drug Control Policy both declined to comment.

Notably, the majority of drug arrests are not for heroine or crack cocaine, but for marijuana. According to the Sentencing Project, marijuana arrests increased 113 percent between 1990 and 2002, and now account for nearly half of all drug arrests annually.

Leroy Hart, 24, of San Diego and New York City, was 15 when he was randomly searched by police on the street. Caught with a small amount of marijuana in his pocket, he was sentenced to a juvenile detention facility.

The young black man now looks back to his teen incarceration as a dangerous turning point in his life.

"Once I came home from juvenile," Hart said, "that was when I really got heavy with it." Through the connections he made in detention, he started dealing more serious substances. At the age of 23, he made a direct sale of crack cocaine to undercover police.

Now out of prison, Hart is enrolled at the Center for Employment Opportunities in New York City. It has been a struggle to stay out of the illegal economy, but Hart is determined to stay above ground.

"I have to live paycheck to paycheck. I get so frustrated … I came close to giving up. Minimum wage is not enough to live on in New York City … we all know that. But at least I'm not out on the street being greedy looking over my shoulder getting ready to be locked up," Hart said.

Facing unemployment … again
By 1996, on "an average day," more black male high school dropouts aged 20 to 35 were in penal custody than in paid employment, according to Western.

Tyrelle Hallett is a young man seeking, but having a hard time finding, a job. A 21 year old of Puerto Rican and black descent, Hallett was tried for burglary as an adult and sentenced to prison before he could finish high school. Although he attained his General Education Development, or GED, during his time in prison, it has done him little good in the year since his release.

Hallett is hoping to land a job working in a New York City warehouse, but as he knows all too well, those jobs are few and far between.

The employment boom these days is in the service sector, and hiring young men with criminal records to, among other things, handle cash, deal with customers or aid the elderly is not an option many managers will consider.

"Jobs in the service industry require more education and better basic skills that they used to" said Holzer. "For those African-American men who early in life sense that they won't be going to college, who will never have access to higher-paying jobs, they're incentive to stay out of trouble diminishes."

Looking into the future
Robert Sampson at Harvard University said that the high incarceration rate among the poor, urban segment of Generation Next will lead to problems with respect to employment and relationships.

"The kids who come out of jail or prison are poor and uneducated. They are on the margins of society and worse yet, they have the stigma of the criminal record." Sampson added, "It's more than a risk -- it's a weight that these kids have to carry that lasts for a pretty long time."

He explained that the incarceration rate facing young, less-educated men is so high that "it has become like a net -- a lot of kids who wouldn't have been incarcerated 20 years ago have now been pulled into a very nasty system that unravels a person's life course and leads to increased crime."

Ryan King of the Sentencing Project agreed. "When people are in their 20s, they are in their formative years -- building a career, developing skills. Young adults who have been imprisoned reach their 30s with no educational skills and are barred from access to support systems."

"We really do have a lost generation," King said.

-- By Venessa Mendenhall, Generation Next