Here's the Real 'Human Catastrophe of Mass Incarceration'

Progressives keep piling on Bill Clinton after he had the audacity to speak the truth to Black Lives Matter protesters. Writing in Slate, Michelle Goldberg says ”Fire Bill Clinton” and holds him at least partly responsible for the “human catastrophe of mass incarceration.”

Conservatives and liberals speak often of the “catastrophe” or “tragedy” of mass incarceration, but we tend to speak of different tragedies. To the Left, mass incarceration is a disastrous product of white supremacy and middle class fear — a typhoon of discrimination that has swept away otherwise-productive citizens and trapped them in a cycle of poverty and prison. 

However, the true tragedy of mass incarceration is the fact that hundreds of thousands of (mainly) young men are repeatedly committing serious crimes. It’s a myth that our prisons are chock-full of nonviolent offenders guilty only of petty drug crimes. Kay Hymowitz lays out the facts:

[T]hough there is a widespread impression the war on drugs explains most of black incarceration, that’s not remotely the case. Drug admissions account for only 20 percent of the rise among the incarcerated since 1980. Almost two-and-a-half times the number of black men are serving sentences for murder, assault, and the like in state and federal prisons as are serving time for using and selling drugs. Today, violent criminals continue to make up by far the largest cohort of the freshman class of prisoners—black, white, and Hispanic.

This tragedy is of course inextricably linked — and contributes to — other tragedies, like the near-complete collapse of the family in inner-city America, rampant drug abuse, and terrible educational outcomes. All of these things work together in a vicious cycle to create repeat generations of young men who lack fathers (or often any positive male role models), who attend failing schools (and make them worse with their own behavior), and attain no marketable skills — much less learn the basic character traits that help build a family and career.

The last thing these communities need is more violence. While we do need to think hard about prison reform, the Left’s simplistic assault on the tactics and institutions that helped end our nation’s worst crime epidemic has a predictable consequence — blood in the streets.