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The New York Times's Upshot released a fascinating piece of data journalism this week, which you may have already seen: the case of the "1.5 million missing black men." They aren't actually "missing," to the extent that we know where they are—most are either dead due to disproportionate mortality rates, or incarcerated due to disproportionate rates of imprisoned African Americans. This is especially startling when you look at the ratio of black women to black men age 25-54 who aren't in prison: it's 100 to 83.
While the Times article doesn't delve into political implications, they aren't difficult to figure out: a sizable piece of the Democratic Party's most reliable population segment (the Democratic vote share among African Americans often exceeds 90 percent) is left unable to vote. And since many of them are in states that disenfranchise felons, they're still unable to vote even when they're no longer "missing" and return to public life. Felon disenfranchisement often gets overlooked amidst the focus on voter ID requirements and registration list purges, but in terms of raw numbers of people affected, ending felon disenfranchisement would likely make the single biggest difference in easing the suppression of potential Democratic voters.
There's more over the fold.
The skewed female-to-male ratio in black communities also interferes with family formation, making future generations of poverty more likely. Though the Times article doesn't explore the link, I've found that the single strongest correlation at the county level between demographic data and Democratic vote percentage, isn't based on race, income, or education, but rather on the percentage of women over age 25 who've never married. That's because the counties with the highest percentages in that area include not only large cities, where you have a lot of millennials starting their careers, but also the rural mostly black counties of the South, where many of the black men are "missing."
When the pool of marriage-age men is so depleted, fewer marriages can occur, and more children instead are raised in single-family households—which, although there's nothing morally wrong with that, is still a likely recipe for poverty because you don't have two adults able to pool their money and their labor power in more efficient fashion. In other words, as sociologists have pointed out, marriage has become both a privilege, and a means to helping you stay privileged.
My initial worry on reading the article was that the decision to focus only on the census category of "households" and not people living in "group quarters" was leading them to assign a lot of black men living in dormitories and, especially, military barracks to the ranks of the "missing." However, explained on the methodology page, that's not the case. For one thing, the sample is limited to men 25-54, which would probably rule out most college undergraduates and recent military enlistees. Also, the military isn't so disproportionately African American (around 18 percent overall for active duty, ranging between 22 percent for the Army and 6 percent for the Coast Guard) that it would skew the larger numbers much.
In fact, if you dig deeper into census information on "group quarters," only a small percentage of the military live in barracks at all these days—339,000 out of 1.4 million active duty, with another approximately 400,000 stationed outside of the country and thus not counted by the census (per 2011, which is probably lower now). Contrast that with 2.3 million persons in prison, 3.7 million in "other" (mostly dorms), and 1.5 million in, surprisingly, nursing homes.
However, if you factor in the racial breakdowns of the people in group quarters according to the census, you get the real sickening scale of the impact of incarceration on African Americans. Only 47,000 blacks (most of whom fall in the 18-24 range anyway) are in military barracks, but 858,000 are incarcerated. (There are also 195,000 in nursing homes, though, given the gender disparity in longevity, probably not too many of them are male.) The Upshot article estimates around 600,000 in prison, but that would exclude black men in prison in the 18-24 (and 55+) brackets, and all black women in prison, so the total 858,000 figure sounds plausible. Even more disturbingly, a larger percentage of the total number of people in prisons is black (39 percent) than white (36 percent). That means there are more black people than white people imprisoned, despite the fact that the white population of the U.S. is between six and seven times as large as the black population.
Justin Wolfers added an interesting post-script to the larger piece, zooming in on the places where the gender ratios are the largest ... and where they're reversed. As I alluded to earlier, where the overall percentage of the black population is the largest, those tend to be the places with the most skewed ratios, especially southern states where the overall percentages of blacks and overall incarceration rates are both high. (Of all cities with more than 10,000 black residents, the worst ratio is one that's been in the news a lot lately—Ferguson, Missouri!)
On the other hand, the places where the ratio is reversed—where there are more black men than women—tend to be the places with the lowest black percentages overall, states like Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, and the Dakotas. Wolfers chalks that up to African-American men going there to work (i.e., extraction industries, he suggests, in Alaska and North Dakota).
But here's where the military might actually be affecting the numbers, after all (especially since most military now live off-base in private-sector housing, not barracks, so they aren't "missing"). The military picks up hundreds of thousands of black men from big cities and the rural South, and temporarily deposits them not just in Afghanistan and Germany, but also Alaska and North Dakota (both of which have multiple Air Force bases), and even San Diego (the only major city that is listed as having a ratio that's skewed toward black men).