Edwards on Black Males

John Edwards predicts that young black males will soon become extinct because they'll all be in jail or dead. He notes, in regard to the plight of the young black man, that we cannot build enough jails to satisfy the way we're carrying out justice currently. He continues,

...Pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They’re all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two.

Are they doomed as Edwards says? Orlando Patterson, professor of Sociology at Harvard University, said in a NYT editorial piece,

The circumstances that far too many African-Americans face — the lack of paternal support and discipline; the requirement that single mothers work regardless of the effect on their children’s care; the hypocritical refusal of conservative politicians to put their money where their mouths are on family values; the recourse by male youths to gangs as parental substitutes; the ghetto-fabulous culture of the streets; the lack of skills among black men for the jobs and pay they want; the hypersegregation of blacks into impoverished inner-city neighborhoods — all interact perversely with the prison system that simply makes hardened criminals of nonviolent drug offenders and spits out angry men who are unemployable, unreformable and unmarriageable, closing the vicious circle.

Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other leaders of the Jena demonstration who view events there, and the racial horror of our prisons, as solely the result of white racism are living not just in the past but in a state of denial.

What will it take to turn around this cycle of depravity?