No comment required on this one by Lexington at The Economist:
Sex and the single black womanHow jail undermines the black familyTHIS week’s column looks at how locking up huge numbers of young black men makes it hard for black women to form stable relationships. Simply put, when there are more women than men in the dating pool, the men have all the power. An African-American man with a good job and no criminal record knows he is a hot commodity. He can get sex without offering commitment, so he is often reluctant to settle down, according to Audrey Chapman, a relationship counsellor and the author of books such as “Getting Good Loving“.
The single black women I spoke to for the column were not happy about this. They all complained about a shortage of eligible black men. Some thought it might be partly because some black men were on the “down-low”, ie they secretly have sex with men. But I doubt there is much difference between the proportion of black men and women who are gay, whereas we know there are huge differences in incarceration rates between the sexes.
A paper by Kerwin Charles and Ming Ching Luoh finds that the mass incarceration of males has a dreadful effect on women in the same “marriage market”. (They divided America into 306 marriage markets, to reflect the fact that most people marry someone who is of the same race, roughly the same age and who lives nearby.) Tim Harford’s book “The Logic of Life” has a more reader-friendly discussion of the subject.
This is a much more serious issue than most people realise, and yet another reason to reconsider America’s extraordinarily harsh punishments for non-violent crimes. If conservatives care about family values, they should be appalled at what jail is doing to the black family.
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