Le New York Times et les races humaines

A droite, M. Gaines qui choisit de gagner sa vie par des attaques à main armée. Mais il ne fut pas assez malin pour échapper à la justice. Après 13 années passées en prison, il retrouve ses fils Shane et Adam lesquels expliquent leur échec scolaire par l'absence de leur père.

Le New York Times a un gros problème avec les races humaines. Il lui est difficile de ne pas rendre compte de la criminalité aux Etats-Unis et de son impact sur la communauté noire. Pourtant, il réussit à chaque fois à décrire le phénomène sans en tirer les conclusions qui s'imposent à tout spécialiste et tout simplement à tout lecteur doté d'un minimum de bon sens.

Cette fois, il s'intéresse au sort des enfants des détenus de droit commun. Il aboutit à la conclusion que les enfants de ces détenus ont bien plus de chances de devenir des criminels à leur tour. Conclusion du journalisme : c'est l'incarcération des pères qui conduit les enfants à la marginalisation sociale et au crime.

Recommandation implicite du New York Times : libérer les pères pour que les enfants ne deviennent pas des criminels à leur tour.

C'est l'exemple même de pensée de gauche qui devient folle.

Pourtant, si autant d'enfants noirs ont des pères en prison c'est tout d'abord parce que leurs géniteurs ont choisi un mode de vie criminel.

Il faut donc s'interroger sur la dérive des jeunes noirs et sur l'impact des discours victimistes dont ils sont abreuvés et dont cet article est un exemple parfait.

Le cas de Terrisa Bryant est particulièrement frappant. Pourquoi est-elle tombé enceinte à 14 ans ? La faute à son père. Celui-ci étant en prison, sa mère devait travailler de longues heures pour nourrir la famille et la miss Bryant a contribué à la vie de la famille en s'occupant de ses frères et sœurs à la place de sa maman. Ne pouvant sortir avec ses amis pour faire la fête, la miss Bryant s'est sentie exclue et ce sentiment a nourri une colère et une frustration qu'elle a voulu compenser en se faisant engrosser par le premier venu.

Cette situation tragique de la communauté noire, que l'aveuglement idéologique de la classe dominante contribue à empirer, se retrouve aussi de manière croissante dans les couches les plus défavorisées de la communauté blanche. Une sorte de quart-monde où se recrute la majorité des criminels blancs. Dans cette population, la criminalité est aussi un phénomène qui se reproduit de génération en génération.

Enfin, n'oublions pas de mentionner le facteur explicatif que le New York Times ne veut jamais prendre en compte : le QI des populations criminogènes, blanches comme noires.

In Prisoners’ Wake, a Tide of Troubled Kids Adam

The circumstances were not promising. Mr. Scott, 20, was awaiting sentencing for drug possession and robbery, but he was allowed supervised release from jail in May to attend a job preparation class — a chance to turn his life around. As he spoke, he wriggled his neck, trying to get used to the necktie required, and he tried to ignore the tracking device on his ankle.

“I had low self-esteem and depression,” Mr. Scott said of his teenage years. Now, his ex-girlfriend was pregnant, and he pondered his child’s prospects.

“I want to be there for this child, and I want the child to know that jail ain’t no place to be,” he said.

The chances of seeing a parent go to prison have never been greater, especially for poor black Americans, and new research is documenting the long-term harm to the children they leave behind. Recent studies indicate that having an incarcerated parent doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behavior, social isolation, depression and problems in school — all portending dimmer prospects in adulthood.

“Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who is studying what some now call the “incarceration generation.”

Incarceration rates in the United States have multiplied over the last three decades, in part because of stiffer sentencing rules. At any given moment, more than 1.5 million children have a parent, usually their father, in prison, according to federal data. But many more are affected over the course of childhood, especially if they are black, new studies show.

Among those born in 1990, one in four black children, compared with one in 25 white children, had a father in prison by age 14. Risk is concentrated among black children whose parents are high-school dropouts; half of those children had a father in prison, compared with one in 14 white children with dropout parents, according to a report by Dr. Wildeman recently published in the journal Demography.

For both blacks and whites, the chances of parental incarceration were far higher than they were for children born just 12 years earlier, in 1978.

Scholars agree that in some cases children may benefit from a parent’s forced removal, especially when a father is a sexual predator or violent at home. But more often, the harm outweighs any benefits, studies have found.

If a parent’s imprisonment deprives a struggling family of earnings or child support, the practical consequences can be fairly clear-cut. While poor urban children had a 3 percent chance of experiencing a period of homelessness over the previous year, those with an incarcerated parent had a 6 percent chance, one study found.

Quantifying other effects of parental incarceration, like aggressive behavior and depression, is more complex because many children of prisoners are already living in deprived and turbulent environments. But researchers using newly available surveys that follow families over time are starting to home in on the impact.

Among 5-year-old urban boys, 49 percent of those who had a father incarcerated within the previous 30 months exhibited physically aggressive behaviors like hitting others or destroying objects, compared with 38 percent of those in otherwise similar circumstances who did not have a father imprisoned, Dr. Wildeman found.

While most attention has been placed on physical aggression, a study by Sara Wakefield, a sociologist following children in Chicago, found that having a parent imprisoned was a mental-health tipping point for some. Thus, while 28 percent of the children in her study over all experienced feelings of social isolation, depression or anxiety at levels that would warrant clinical evaluation or treatment, about 35 percent of those who had an incarcerated parent did.

Such hidden issues can have lifelong consequences.

Terrisa Bryant, 20, who was in the same jobs class as Mr. Scott, with a group called Strive, said she grew up resenting her father’s absences, including his time spent in prison. With her mother working day and night to put food on the table, Ms. Bryant was the baby sitter for her younger siblings.

“I couldn’t go out,” Ms. Bryant said. “I felt isolated.”

Ms. Bryant said she thought her anger and isolation helped explain why she got pregnant at 14 and had to drop out of school to raise her child. Now, she hopes to get certified for a career in child care.

With financial woes now forcing many states to rethink the relentless expansion of prisons, “this intergenerational transfer of problems should be included as an additional cost of incarceration to society,” said Sarah S. McLanahan, a sociologist at Princeton University and director of a national survey of families that is providing data for many of the new studies.

Heather Mac Donald, a legal expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, agreed that everything possible should be done to help the children of people who were incarcerated. But Ms. Mac Donald said that it was hard to distinguish the effects of having a parent in prison from those of having a parent who is a criminal, and that any evaluation of tough sentencing policies, which she supports, had to weigh the benefits for the larger community. “A large portion of fathers were imprisoned on violence or drug-trafficking charges,” she said. “What would be the effects on other children in the neighborhood if those men are out there?”

Adam Gaines, 40, of Owings Mills, Md., has firsthand experience of watching his children flounder. He was freed last year after 13 and a half years in prison for robbery. Now, he is trying to be the father he never was to a son who dropped out of school in the 10th grade, another son who is just starting high school and a teenage daughter who had a baby and dropped out of school.

Mr. Gaines shook his heroin addiction after years in prison, has moved back in with his wife, Tasuha, and is studying to be a fitness teacher.

When his father was behind bars, said Mr. Gaines’s oldest child, Adam Jr., 19, “I didn’t have a role model, and I had to learn on the streets how to carry myself, what it meant to be a man.”

Mr. Scott, too, may not be around for his child. Despite his vow to break the cycle of failure and his job preparation class, he disappeared shortly after talking to a reporter in May, apparently to avoid a mandatory drug test, and did not report to his probation officer.

Mr. Scott was arrested on charges of absconding in the last week of May and is now in a Washington jail awaiting a sentence that could be three years or more — and making it more likely that his child, too, will join the incarceration generation.