Ghettoside
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3 nearly 40 percent of Rampart residents remained below the poverty line Data from the Los Angeles City Planning Department based on 2000 U.S. Census figures.
4 recent immigrants tend to have lower homicide rates Ramiro Martinez, Jr., Latino Homicide: Immigration, Violence, and Community (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 105–8.
5 Instead, they were stopovers For demographic studies indicating that Hispanics were dispersing, see Philip J. Ethington, William H. Frey and Dowell Myers, “The Racial Resegregation of Los Angeles County,” Public Research Report 2001-04, Race Contours 2000 Study (University of Southern California–University of Michigan, 2001).
6 an “unabashed preference” for Hispanic labor Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 4, 6, 14, 25, 33, 60, 65–74, 80–88, 94.
7 “Black segregation was permanent, across generations” Douglas S. Massey, interview with the author, March 8, 2012.
8 No one else had it as bad Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
9 black people were no more likely to have white neighbors Ethington, Frey and Myers, pp. 8, 14.
10 Indices of residential segregation are strong homicide predictors E.g., Ruth D. Peterson, Lauren J. Krivo, “Racial Segregation and Black Urban Homicide,” Social Forces 71, no. 4 (June 1993): pp. 1001–26; and Matthew R. Lee, “Concentrated Poverty, Race and Homicide,” The Sociological Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Spring 2000): pp. 189–206
11 Prison was safer than freedom The overall homicide death rate for black, white, and Hispanic men over eighteen in California in 2009 and 2010 was two and a half times greater than the corresponding death rate in the prison population. Men outside prison suffered a much higher homicide death rate even though they are, on average, older than the prison population, and so should be at lower risk.
The safety benefit of prison for the highest-risk group—young black men—is probably even greater than these figures suggest. Prison homicide victims are nearly always older men. Press releases on homicides during the year above, nearly all of which list the age of the victim, mention only one inmate victim who was in his twenties, a twenty-six-year-old, and nearly all the rest were in their forties or even sixties. Given the very high death rates of black men in their early twenties outside prison, the absence of any victims in this age category inside prison walls is especially noteworthy. This is not to dispute that there are a lot of nonfatal assaults in prison—fistfights and worse—but simply to note that the lethality is on a much lower scale than outside. (Computation by the author. Prison population statistics and homicide releases are published by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Homicide counts to verify them were provided by CDCR at the request of the author; thanks to Bill Sessa. California homicide death rates for adult males are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Injury Prevention and Control: Fatal Injury Reports. Demographic age data provided at the request of the author by Jonathan Buttle, California State Census Data Center, Demographic Research Unit, California State Department of Finance.)
12 estimated as high as one in thirty-five “The 1997 Chances of Lifetime Murder Victimization,” Section V, in Crime in the United States, 1999, Uniform Crime Reports, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C. The figure used here is for a black male of the prisoner’s age by five-year interval. The corresponding chance for a white male was 1 in 251.
CHAPTER 21
1 545 black men and boys had been killed in Los Angeles County Files provided by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office. Thanks to Craig Harvey for years of assistance with this data.
EPILOGUE
1 a dramatic easing of the residential hyper-segregation Thanks to demographer William H. Frey for help in interpreting segregation patterns.
2 enrollment of working-age African Americans in SSI in 2009 See Patricia P. Martin and John L. Murphy, “Research and Statistics Note, No. 2014-01: African Americans: Description of Social Security and Supplemental Security Income Participation and Benefit Levels Using the American Community Survey” (Social Security Administration, Official of Retirement and Disability Policy, Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics, January 2014), p. 13.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JILL LEOVY is an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Los Angeles.