This essay looks at how Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965 report “The Negro Family” came to predict America’s failed criminal justice system. Moynihan warned that black families were facing a crisis because of poverty and, specifically, unemployment among black men. In the 50 years since this report, black poverty, black crime, and black incarceration rates have increased. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned. This mass incarceration has only made matters worse, says Heather Ann Thompson, by widening the income gap between white and black Americans – in part by locating most prisons in white rural areas.

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