“The position of most black men, relative to white men, is no better than how things stood after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965. That’s the sobering conclusion of a new paper out from University of Chicago economists Derek Neal and Armin Rick, who find that the considerable economic progress among black men between 1940 and 1980 has halted, and in many cases reversed.
A major driver of this shift has been the rise of more punitive treatments for criminal offenders, resulting in skyrocketing incarceration rates. These changes “have had a much larger impact on black communities than white communities because arrest rates have historically been much greater for blacks than whites,” the authors write.”
Read>> Charting the shocking rise of racial disparity in our criminal justice system