Forum: Black Male Incarceration Adds to Social Woes Predicted in Moynihan Report - Higher Education

Forum: Black Male Incarceration Adds to Social Woes Predicted in Moynihan Report - Higher Education: In 1965, a growing tide of Black male joblessness spurred the prediction by then Assistant U.S. Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan that the Black family would experience considerable disruption in the coming years. Moynihan’s famous analysis, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” had stated that the Black family, “battered and harassed by discrimination,” was “the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community.”

For law professor and author Michelle Alexander, the mass incarceration of Black men stemming from the prosecution of the “War on Drugs” has created social conditions among African-Americans far more devastating than what Moynihan predicted 48 years ago. “It’s been said that things have worsened since the Moynihan Report was released, and I would say that is a considerable understatement,” she said Friday at the Urban Institute think tank and Fathers Incorporated organization policy forum, “Black Families Five Decades after the Moynihan Report.”