The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration: Part I-II

After decades of mass incarceration that have left the United States with the largest incarcerated population in the world, politicians of all stripes are suddenly declaring the policy a mistake. But their pronouncements have failed to reckon with the phenomenon's deep historical roots, or with the damage it has done to black families. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on "The Negro Family" tragically helped launch this assault, it's time to reclaim his original intent.

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, photographs by Greg Kahn

Never marry again in slavery. - Margaret Garner, 1858

Wherever the law is, crime can be found. - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, 1973

I.

"Lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.” By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambas­sador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol. “My relations are obviously those of divided allegiance,” Moyni­han wrote in a diary he kept during the 1950s. “Apparently I loved the old man very much yet had to take sides … choosing mom in spite of loving pop.” In the same journal, Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and father—They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes—of whom the least rejection was cause for untold agonies—the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”