African American Adulthood

According to the United States Department of Justice as March 2014 there are approximately 39398 prisoners ,statewide , in Louisiana prisons and of that number 26,776 of the inmates are classified as African-American, of that number 94.4% are African American males which accounts for 25,277 male inmates in prisons (Le Blanc June 30, 2013). It has been said that, the etiology as it relates to African-American males, in the prison system, attended substandard schools that are not considered to be a safest environment, that the communities they grew up in are violent therefore, violence was witnessed on a day-to-day basis and it became a normal part of day-to-day life for these youth and they also became part of that cycle.

This intent of this article is to examine the negative socioeconomic and political effects on African American men after they have a felony criminal record. I will also examine the level of equality that exists between White men and Black men in respect to their socioeconomic and political standing after they have a felony criminal record. Many sociologists, criminologists and social commentators (Pettit and Western 2004; Muller and Schrage 2014; Smith and Hattery 2010; Pager 2003; Pager 2011) have written about the effects of the Prison Industrial complex on

First Slavery, then Jim Crow, now mass incarceration; the Black community can no longer stay silent while being oppressed into a cycle of poverty. Because America has suppressed African Americans into a degraded class for so long, it has nearly been impossible for blacks to escape from such an impoverished neighborhood. Therefore, African Americans are forced to live lives struggling to survive. In many instances, blacks turn to one another because they cannot trust society; but these disadvantaged communities have nothing to offer African Americans. Furthermore, their only offer is to rely on themselves to survive and they turn towards criminal activity, which ends them in jail. A growing share of African Americans have been arrested for drug crimes; through studies, it has been proven

This research proposal will explore the dependent factors that determine why impoverished adolescent Black Males turn to crack cocaine as a means of survival. Survival is defined as, the act of or facts of surviving, especially under adverse or unusual circumstances. Generally, Black Adolescent males engage themselves in crack cocaine by way of dealing or trafficking. This study is important because there are many underlying factors that are not studied in regard to why this population turns to crack cocaine as a means of survival.

I do believe that emerging adulthood is a critical time for spiritual development. Emerging adulthood is time roughly in between adolescence and adulthood. This is one of the first times in most individuals’ lives that they begin to experience life for themselves. The choices they make reflects upon themselves, the things they believe in reflects upon themselves, and the people they choose to associate with reflects upon themselves. Sense this is a time of new found individual, in my eyes it is the prefect time for spiritual development. Individuals in emerging adulthood are mentally developed enough so that they can make up their own choices with knowledge of the potential benefits and consequences. Additionally, I do believe in Hall’s claims.

The Umar Abdullah-Johnson Theory of Black Male Alienation posits that a five-stage cycle of institutional repression exists that has effectively sent more black men to jail than it has to college. Any attempt to reverse this war against America’s most misunderstood population begins with a firm analysis of the process and its origins in boyhood. Americans, including Blacks, have become so desensitized to the pain of Black boys and so expectant of their failures that their pain is often overlooked and their achievements treated like occasional glitches in a system that has successfully made Black boys a permanent underclass in this country. “But the color of a Negro 's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target” (Richard Wright, Black Boy)

Young men are a very big and important subgroup of the U.S. population; according to the 2010 Census, there were 151,781,326 males in the U.S. and 32,953,433 of those men were aged 15 to 29 (U.S. Bureau, 2011). In the PowerPoint professor Aldcroft says incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in recent years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison. By 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated and by their mid-30's, 60 percent of black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison. This is a good example of the “school to prison pipeline”. Education has such a big importance in society, but students are being pushed away from schools and instead are

1) I would consider myself to be in the emerging adulthood because I had many decisions that will possibly benefit my future. For example , I decided I would go out of state for college and be away from my parents . I picked the major that best fit my interest and I had made the decision to get a job to earn a s source of income. Emerging adulthood refers to a period where an individual transits from adolescence to adulthood . This is a period where the individual begins to establish independences from parents and take on adult roles (Steinberg, Bornstein, Vandell & Rook ,2011) .

For instance, many African American young men who grow up without a father or active male role model in their life, are likely to resort to crime as a means to survival or for a sense of love. Often times these teenagers end up being mentored by drug dealers or individuals who truly don’t have their best interest at hand. “Extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods are socially isolated from mainstream society, and as such, their residents have less access to jobs, fewer opportunities to interact with positive role models, and fewer strong social institutions” (Wright, 4). This evidence proves that there are social issues that have an effect ton crime in mainly black communities. While, I do believe that African Americans face many economic and social issues that are constantly past down from generations, I think that law enforcement can have a positive impact on these children’s lives and possibly prevent them from becoming incarcerated. Although, growing up I was fortunate to have a mother and a father in my life, my parents often struggled to make ends me, but they were determined that they would not let their situation hinder me and my sibling’s

Goffman (2009) also stated that, “Young men also turn their wanted status into a resource by using it to account for shortcomings or failures that may have occurred anyway,” (p. 354). These findings are accurately and adequately described so that readers can evaluate the claims and have a good picture of how their lives are affected. The research findings matter to me in a sense that I now have a much broader understanding on what black males go through in the type of neighborhoods that they live in. I was able to see how prejudice and racism also play a big role in young black male men being the target of being incarcerated.

In this paper I will talk about and discuss why many young African-Americans go back in jail after they have been there once before. Many young African-Americans deal with this throughout the country and often wonder how they got to that certain point. The goal of this paper is to essentially shed some light onto this situation that is common amongst African-Americans and to perhaps find a solution to this problem. Like I mentioned before, the group I will target will be young male African-Americans between the ages of 17 and 25.

From birth, black children are taught that they are less than. Toys, media, literature all portray bodies that don’t look like their own. Instead, they have to find identity in what they are exposed to. Movies and T.V. shows are riddled with black men portraying criminals or athletes, and black women being depicted as the sassy and rude, best friend. These stereotypes are far from the truth. However, the message of these depictions does not go unnoticed by African- American youth. The result is young black boys thinking that their future only entails a life of crime,

People like to call America the land of the free which is ironic given that as a country it has the largest percentage of incarcerated citizens; this in itself is already a significant problem and is indicative of deep and pernicious influences that are warping American society. the severity of this problem notwithstanding, the blatant racial inequality in the incarceration rates between white and black individuals is heinous crime -- on par with if not more deplorable than slavery itself. In particular young black men seem particularly vulnerable to this disparity. In contrast to the challenges of investigating and understanding this issue, given its complexity and how deeply it is interwoven in our society, the motivation for this research is easy to understand. This inequality is harmful. It is harmful to the ones who get imprisoned, it is harmful to the communities they leave behind, and it is harmful to our nation as a whole due to the deep rifts it creates between fellow citizens. Ultimately this paper was written to shed light upon the continuing institutional racism against the black community that leads to serious health concerns; as well as expose the mechanisms that drive it, in the hope of contributing to creating a nation truly free of the legacies of slavery.

Currently 1 out of 8 African American children have a father that is incarcerated (“Children of Incarcerated Parents,” 2009). It has become a norm for African American children to grow up in single-parent households. The war on drugs plays a large

“Wealth is of the mind, not the pockets,” a quote from one of my all-time favorite music producers, Pharrell Williams. However, young African American men from improvised inner cities score below their counterparts in other racial and ethnic groups when it comes to graduation rates, literacy rates, and college preparedness. A black male growing up in these neighborhoods rarely thinks about self/higher education. His aspirations gear more towards making fast money to get by. He may have to resort to crime to get the kind of fast money he is looking for. Can you blame him? When the odds “seem” to be against you, you have no choice but to do anything you can to survive. Notice, I stressed the word “seem”, because I want us to explore the current generation of growing African American males and the effect of media and technology in their lives. Studies show that media images have a large impact on perceptions when the viewers have less real world experience with the topic. In an age where technology brings together different ideals, cultures and belief systems through the Internet and social media, one can assume that accurate stories are being publicized about African American males holistically. Nonetheless, the majority of what is portrayed in media about African American men involves violence, drug abuse, unstable households, drug dealing and other criminal acts. Which can arguably be outward expressions of an impoverished society. The purpose of this paper is to explore