a moment of clarity.

words. 

for your consideration...

"The question we might also ask is not whether an individual should be punished for an act of violence, but where this violence is coming from and how we might prevent it. Often, when older people in the neighborhood talked about the troubling levels of violence, they blamed bad parenting, absent fathers, or a lack of moral fortitude in the younger generation. Maybe all this is true, but from what I observed, the roots of crime and violence were also found in economic hardship and in particular a profound dislocation from the legal labor market.

...The deep employment problems of African-American young men cannot be solved through police work or prison sentences. They predate the war on crime and may well survive it. But if we want young men like Chuck and Mike to end their reliance on an underground, illegal trade for income and employment, we must address the chronic joblessness that they face. As long as the drug trade continues to sustain a large portion of poor African-American communities, we will see a level of violence there that no resident or outside observer feels is acceptable.

Policy analysts sometimes look at a neighborhood like this one and conclude that the main problem is one of police legitimacy. This sanitizes the intense conflict going on between the police and the residents of poor minority communities. In these neighborhoods, the problem is not that the police lack legitimacy; the problem is that residents who are already struggling with acute poverty, joblessness and drug addiction are living under daily threat of arrest.

...Whatever our opinion about Mike or Chuck’s guilt or innocence, we might agree that a criminal justice system that arrests an 11-year-old boy for sitting in the passenger seat of a stolen car or makes a 14-year-old boy scared to seek medical treatment for a severe injury is not working for the public good. Perhaps we might also agree that requiring young men to avoid their mother’s houses, their workplaces and their friends’ funerals in order to stay out of jail is also misguided.

...People on both sides of the aisle and on both sides of the courtroom now acknowledge that the criminal justice system needs a major overhaul. After four decades of zero tolerance and getting tough on crime, we seem poised for change. Can we seize the moment?"

THE NEW YORK TIMES: This Fugitive Life