Articles

Why Young People Embrace Prison Culture

Andrew Young
July 1, 2001

The destructive jailhouse culture expressed in much youth behavior today -- from "butt britches" to predatory violence -- is directly linked to the persistent poverty in our society and the growing number of people we are placing behind bars.

The increasing influence of jailhouse culture is inseparable from our nation's inclination to address social problems by ignoring economic injustice and swelling our prisons with the products of that injustice. We institutionalize inequity instead of making institutions more equitable. In our political efforts to control society and the effects of poverty, we have turned to jails. We have criminalized poverty while a largely amoral marketplace packages and peddles jailhouse culture and criminal behavior to an impressionable and rebellious younger generation.

Adults understand that young people of every generation will rebel to some degree against established authority and especially against its most unjust elements. Such rebellion often includes identifying with the suffering, even the culture, of the victims of injustice. To identify with the "underdog" is not only part of the very nature of young people, it is also in keeping with longstanding religious and democratic traditions of our nation. It has stimulated much of the social progress throughout history.

In the '50s and '60s, many young people, black and white, identified with the oppressed African-American community and fought racism. In the '60s and '70s, millions empathized with the war-ravaged people of Southeast Asia and protested against the conflict in Vietnam.

Many of today's young people identify with our nation's poor, who are oppressed and largely forgotten. A grossly disproportionate percentage of these people populate our nation's prisons. Unfortunately, too much of our youths' concern is expressed in symbolic and sometimes destructive imitation rather than constructive protest and action.

This is especially true for many poor urban youth. For them, our society over-promises and under-delivers on opportunities that can turn ragged poverty into material wealth. Like all of us, they are inundated by advertising, entertainment images and other influences that stress material success and comfort.

Yet the urban poor are largely locked out of the economic opportunities required to achieve such success and comfort. The very natural human response to rejection is to rebel. Some of that rebellion leads to conflict and incarceration. Even those who do not run afoul of the law often reject established authority and embrace one of its most extreme opposites -- the culture of jail.

Predictably, this rebellious tendency among urban poor youth is exploited by the marketplace, which recognizes the opportunity to turn a profit through "crossover" marketing of such anti-establishment sentiment to affluent suburban youth. From the lyrics of "gangsta rap" to the excessive violence of Hollywood action films to ratings-addicted television evening news programs, violence and criminality -- the essence of jailhouse culture -- receive undue attention and too often are glorified.

'Islands of poverty'

It is little wonder then that so-called "butt britches" are as likely to hang from the hips of suburban teens as inner-city youth, and that violence-inciting and often misogynistic lyrics of urban rap explode from the sound systems of white, Asian and Latino youth.

All of them are learning to navigate the cultural seas of our society. All of them have a heart for the outcast and despised, the poor and imprisoned.

Almost every problem we face now is related to the fact that, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "We have people isolated on lonely islands of poverty in the midst of this ocean of material wealth." And all of the problems of hate, all the problems of disease, ignorance and many other social difficulties start in those islands of poverty.

Poverty should not be a problem today. Poverty should be seen as an economic opportunity. I realized this while working on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Free enterprise needed to expand. Mexico and Canada, as our neighbors, need to be a part of our global economy and closely associated with the United States.

The gross national product of Mexico and Canada combined at that time was about $400 billion. Suddenly I realized that the Hispanic-American economy in the United States was almost $400 billion. The African-American economy was almost $500 billion. It is now estimated at $572 billion.

But we have yet to reach full-fledged economic development in our African-American, Hispanic-American or Native American communities. When you add the economy of small-town rural white America, which also is a neglected economy, you are talking about an underserved economy within U.S. borders in excess of $1 trillion.

These communities are poor largely because they have been denied access to capital. Their members historically have been denied training, management skills and marketing attention. In fact, we don't have a free trade agreement with our poor communities. One of the things we ought to agree on today is that access to capital will be a basic human right in the 21st century.

Give the poor an opportunity

Our challenge is to see poor people as people who can develop business ideas and programs. The first black millionaire was a woman who developed hair grease. In Bangladesh, Muhammed Yunus of the Grameen Bank took beggar women and gave them small amounts of capital. These women developed their own business plans, nurtured their fledgling enterprises and developed a $1 billion bank in 18 years. It became a $2 billion bank two years later years because people -- who were once weaving straw to make baskets to sell -- are now assembling cell phones for Ericsson and building buses for Volvo. They are full participants in the capitalist revolution because they now own 50 percent of the factory -- and they are working there as shareholders and investors; not simply as minimum-wage employees.

One of the most promising and urgent challenges is how to give poor people an opportunity to develop their own enterprises to benefit their families, their communities and the world we share with them. We ought to agree today that access to capital will be treated as a basic human right in the 21st century.

If we more evenly distribute economic opportunity, the poverty rate will decrease, prison populations will diminish and the unsettling influence of jailhouse culture on our young people will wane.

(This opinion was published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 1, 2001.)