*In her documentary series “Our America,” Lisa Ling aims to peel the scab off of hard truths that are happening across this country, such as child sex trafficking and suicide among veterans – two stories that were explored in the show’s current second season on OWN.
This Sunday, the 38-year-old journalist will put a spotlight on the disproportionate number of African-American men in prison and their challenges in finding employment after they’ve paid their debt to society.
The episode, titled “Incarceration Generation,” explores the rate at which black men are jailed and ways to reduce it. She interviews inmates who are caught in a growing cycle of crime and punishment that crosses generations, creating poverty and destroying communities.
It was the opportunity to do these kinds of stories each week that drew Ling to the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) following her investigative work for the National Geographic Channel, which she took on following her three years at “The View.”
“It has certainly been the most gratifying work experience I’ve had ever had,” she says of “Our America.” “I’ve never been prouder of any work that I’ve ever done. And I really feel like this has been the culmination of everything I’ve ever learned as a journalist. And it’s ironic that all of these stories are here in America, in our own backyards.
“Because I can’t tell you how many times throughout the course of shooting this series, that I felt like I was in a foreign place or a distant place. But the reality is that all of these stories, in their greatest complexity, are in our backyards. And we set out to try and understand or explore what it really means to be an American. And sometimes the answer to that is a very moving answer, but sometimes it’s very challenging.”
Below, Ling explains the single motto that drives her investigative work: “Everybody has a story.”
Lisa Ling says ‘everyone has a story’ by CherieNic
The Incarceration Generation episode of “Our America with Lisa Ling” airs Sunday, Nov. 20 (10-11 p.m. ET/PT) on OWN.
Below are statistics compiled by The New York Times in 2009.
i wonder if MO’Kelly will talk about this topic.
nah probably not. hes too worried about what celebrities are doing and what new albums they have coming out.
They in jail because these stupid Black women think they can raise our children without men in their lives and these sorry Black men aren’t stepping up and being the fathers they need to be to guide their kids in the right direction. Anybody can be a sperm donor or a recepticle to bring a child into this world but it takes a real man and a real women to raise a child to be a productive member of society.
Sooooo true, khanman !!
T’is a sad commentary indeed. I agree khanman, but how do you raise them to be productive, when the “kid-parents” aren’t even old enough drive or out of jr. high, THEIR parents(?) are 19-24 and the grandparents are in their 30′s? I used to tape daytime shows and MAKE my daughters watch Maury (early Maury). Anything that would profoundly effect their lives like STDs, promiscuity, stealing, drugs, I had them watch b/c I wanted them to be scared to “take-seriously-what-was-poked-at-them-in-fun”. It’s like no one wants to take responsibility. SHMH.
AMEN nightshift!!! I would sit and watch show like Maury & Spring with my daughter when we were both able to…
I think these shows serve as great talking points with your pre teens & teens! I know my daughter certainly learned valuable lessons on what not to do watching them. She is a 4.0 GPA senior ranked 8th in her class at Renaissance High School in Detroit MI.
A lot of these men are in prison b/c they simply made bad choices and had to face the consequences. They knew right from wrong and still did wrong but I will keep in mind that many have been bamboozled by the system as well. Yes, I’m sure many of them come from homes who were fatherless but I know a lot of men who are progressing well in life and came from the bottom of the barrel with nothing. There are some in prison who come from good homes as well and when they got to a certain age, may have follow the wrong crowd or just decided to do the opposite in their life. It just saddens me to see more Black men in prison when they should be filling up the college campuses and opening up businesses.
I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a spin from white people on the real reason why so many Black men are in Prison. No matter how you try to spin it by citing poverty, lack of adequate legal representation, absentee fathers …. the only reason is that we live in a hopelessly racist society.
Recently, they released a survey showing that black teens were least likely to use drugs and alcohol. “39 percent of white teens and 37 percent of Latinos reported having abused substances in the past year, compared to 32 percent of blacks and 24 percent of Asians.” But yet, “in the 1990s, the juvenile black drug arrest rate was nearly three times that of whites, and in 2008 it remained almost double.”
In studies showing who is more likely to be carrying contraband in a vehicle, the hit rate for Whites was 3.8, blacks 3.3%, Hispanics, 3.2%. For weapons, the hit rate for whites was 0.8, blacks 0.7% and Hispanics 0.7%.
Btu the rate of incarceration for whites is 412 per 100,000 compared to 2290 for blacks, 742 for Hispanics.
So white people are more likely to use drugs, carry contraband and make up the largest portion of the society, but makes up the smallest portion of people arrested for these crimes.
The statistics for every crime is similar. Based on who is most likely to commit an offense, there is no other explanation why so many b lack men are in prison, except racism.
“The American prison and jail system is defined by an entrenched racial disparity in the population of incarcerated people.”
If this bitch wants to be regarded with any credibility, she would abstain from wasting time on all the other make belief reasons for this disparity and concentrate on the only one worth mentioning.
I couldnt have said it better! Reds, your a breath of fresh air! TRUTH SHALL SET US FREE…..THIS TYPE OF HATE HAS DESTROYED THIS COUNTRY….THAT BLACK PEOPLE HAVE BUILT, THROUGH BLOOD, SWEAT AND MANY TEARS!!!!!!! Yea, I said it….BLACK PEOPLE BUILT THIS COUNTRY!!!!!!!
I just watched the documentary and the question raised in the title was never honestly dealt with.
If you are going to Explore Why So Many Black Men are in Prison, then by implication, you have to compare their predicament with other races. Why the disparity?
The documentary looked at what it claims is the cycle of incarceration of a select group of black men, all who committed actual crimes. OK, but blacks are not the only ones committing crimes, and statistics shows that they are not committing it at a higher rate than whites. So why do they end up back in jail so often compared to the white criminal who often seems to go unpunished by the system?
The only time there were any hint of an answer to the question asked in the title, was when she mentioned the war on drugs, where black men are arrested at twelve times the rate of other races, even though statistics shows that drug use is the same across all races.
The average person watching a documentary like this, bearing in mind the title, will come to the obvious conclusion. So Many Black Men are in Prison, because they are the ones committing crimes. I mean, the content of the documentary should provide an answer to the question raised in the topic, and all we saw in the documentary are these black men caught up in a life of crime. So what other conclusion can you arrive at?
There is barely any mention of the fact that so many black men are in prison, not just because they are the only ones committing crimes, but because they are disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system.
I ain’t got not’n against a documentary focusing on crime in the black community, but name your documentary accordingly. And even then, there should be a disclaimer, that other communities commit crimes at a comparable rate. Never mind the fact that the arrest rate is far different.
This type of journalism, so lacking in context, could be viewed as a racist attempt to depict black people as criminals.
I don’t think Lisa Ling is a racist, but based on this documentary, her journalism left much to be desired.
I mean, you all up in them black people houses documenting their loved ones cycle of crime, like that is the reason why such a disproportionate amount of them are in prison. They are not the only ones committing crimes, but why are they the only ones doing the time? Provide some context to the racist system we have to deal with.
Almost reminds me of one of them Soledad O’Brien pieces on Black in America. So misleading and one sided.
Read all of your comments Reds and you make a lot of sense. Very articulate and keeping it real. Come visit us at our website for black men: AfroDaddy.com – The Black Man Survival Guide. We would be glad to have you and we welcome your input. http://afrodaddy.com
Thanks.
I checked out your website. I always thought their needs to be a “Black Man Survival Guide” for a system that targets black people the way this society does. As 2 Pac said, they got me trapped. They throw you in jail, then when you come out, you black listed from getting a job. Even when you don’t have a record you suffer from unemployment and housing discrimination. How the fuck can you move up? Yeah, some of us do, but too many of us can’t. Face it, the system is designed to keep black people down. It’s not always our fault. No other race could even endure what we face. The only way forward for blacks as a group is to come up with a counter plan.
Racism? Bullshit. The facts pr The race industry and its elite enablers take it as self-evident that high black incarceration rates result from discrimination.At a presidential primary debate this Martin Luther King Day, for instance, Sen. Barack Obama charged that blacks and whites “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, (and) receive very different sentences . . . for the same crime.”Not to be outdone, Sen. Hillary Clinton promptly denounced the “disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more African-Americans proportionately than whites.”If a listener didn’t know anything about crime, such charges of disparate treatment might seem plausible.After all, in 2006, blacks were 37.5% of all state and federal prisoners, though they’re under 13% of the national population. About one in 33 black men was in prison in 2006, compared with one in 205 white men and one in 79 Hispanic men. Eleven percent of all black males between the ages of 20 and 34 are in prison or jail.The dramatic rise in the correctional population over the past three decades — to 2.3 million people at the end of 2007 — has only amplified the racial accusations against the criminal-justice system.The favorite culprits for high black prison rates include a biased legal system, draconian drug enforcement and even prison itself. None of these explanations stands up to scrutiny.The black incarceration rate is overwhelmingly a function of black crime. Insisting otherwise only worsens black alienation and further defers a real solution to the black crime problem.Racial activists usually remain silent about that problem. But in 2005, the black homicide rate was more than seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed more than 52% of all murders in America. In 2006, the black arrest rate for most crimes was two to nearly three times blacks’ representation in the population. Blacks constituted 39.3% of all violent-crime arrests, including 56.3% of all robbery and 34.5% of all aggravated-assault arrests, and 29.4% of all property-crime arrests.The advocates acknowledge such crime data only indirectly: by charging bias on the part of the system’s decision makers. As Obama suggested in the Martin Luther King debate, police, prosecutors and judges treat blacks and whites differently “for the same crime.”But in fact, cops don’t over-arrest blacks and ignore white criminals. The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. No one has ever come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.Racial activists also allege that prosecutors overcharge and judges oversentence blacks. Backing up this bias claim has been the holy grail of criminology for decades — and the prize remains as elusive as ever.In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution after a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. After conviction, blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, however — an outcome that reflected the gravity of their offenses as well as their criminal records.Unfair drug policies are an equally popular explanation for black incarceration rates. Legions of pundits, activists and academics charge that the war on drugs is a war on minorities.They point to federal crack penalties, the source of the greatest amount of misinformation in the race and incarceration debate. Under a 1986 law, five grams of crack triggers a mandatory minimum five-year sentence in federal court; powder-cocaine traffickers get the same five-year minimum for 500 grams.The media love to target the federal crack penalties because crack defendants are likely to be black. In 2006, 81% of federal crack defendants were black while only 27% of federal powder-cocaine defendants were.Since federal crack rules are more severe than those for powder, and crack offenders are disproportionately black, those rules must explain why so many blacks are in prison, the conventional wisdom holds.But consider that in 2006, only 5,619 crack sellers were tried federally, 4,495 of them black. It’s going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006 — or the 858,000 black prisoners in custody overall, if one includes the population of county and city jails.Moreover, the press almost never mentions the federal methamphetamine-trafficking penalties, which are identical to those for crack. In 2006, the 5,391 sentenced federal meth defendants were 54% white, 39% Hispanic and 2% black. No one calls the federal meth laws anti-Hispanic or anti-white.The press has also served up a massive dose of crack revisionism aimed at proving the racist origins of the war on crack. Crack was never a big deal, the revisionist story line goes. The belief that crack was an inner-city scourge was a racist illusion.The assertion that concern about crack was motivated by racism ignores a key fact: Black leaders were the first to sound the alarm about the drug, as Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy documents in “Race, Crime, and the Law.” These politicians were reacting to a devastating outbreak of inner-city violence and addiction unleashed by the new form of cocaine.The crack market differed radically from the discreet phone transactions and private deliveries that characterized powder-cocaine distribution: Volatile young dealers sold crack on street corners, using guns to establish their turf. The national spike in violence in the mid-1980s was largely due to the crack trade, and its victims were overwhelmingly black inner-city residents.It takes shameless sleight of hand to turn an effort to protect blacks from harm into a conspiracy against them. If Congress had ignored black legislators’ calls to increase cocaine-trafficking penalties, the outcry among the groups now crying racism would have been deafening.To be sure, a legislative bidding war drove federal crack penalties ultimately to an arbitrary and excessive point; the current movement to reduce those penalties is appropriate. But it was not racism that led to the crack sentencing scheme.Critics follow up their charges about crack with several false claims about drugs and imprisonment.The first is that drug enforcement has been the most important cause of the overall rising incarceration rate since the 1980s. Not true.Violent crime has always been the leading driver of prison growth, especially since the 1990s. In state prisons, where 88% of the nation’s inmates are housed, violent and property offenders make up over 3 1/2 times the number of state drug offenders.Next, critics blame drug enforcement for rising racial disparities in prison. Again, the facts say otherwise. In 2006, blacks were 37.5% of the 1,274,600 state prisoners. If you remove drug prisoners from that population, the percentage of black prisoners drops to 37%.Finally, race and anti-incarceration activists argue that we are sending harmless low-level offenders to prison, disrupting communities. To the contrary: In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending.The JFA Institute, an anti-incarceration advocacy group, estimated in 2007 that in only 3% of violent victimizations and property crimes does the offender end up in prison. And taking criminals out of poor inner-city communities has allowed the many law-abiding residents there to get on with their lives, freed from coove otherwise:
@khanman: and it takes a real woman to know when to open and close her legs and not let every tom dick or harry shack up with her and her kids.
Ah din do nuffins!!
Here is my view, it starts with a childs home life and parents. Parents MUST LEAD BY EXAMPLE. Also a woman should be able to have free birth control if she can not afford it. Also she should be able to have a free abortion since she is unable to support or care for the child if she has no way to. When a child is born into poverty and ignorance the cycle doesn’t stop. EDUCATION should be available for free to those seeking a better life. Education is the most important thing in life.