However, if the War on Drugs played any role in shaping the contemporary black family, it’s almost impossible to decipher from the data. Despite Nixon’s early 1970s call to arms, the War on Drugs didn’t lead to many casualties until well into the next decade. As of 1979, only 5.7 percent of U.S. prisoners were incarcerated for drug offenses. Yet as we’ve just seen, by that time, nearly half of black births were already to single mothers. The number of men imprisoned for drug crimes rose only modestly until 1990, four years after Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, legislating harsher sentences for crack cocaine, a move often cited as a cause of the disproportionately black prison population. Far from leading to more fatherless children, the growing number of black men imprisoned for drugs coincided with a flattening out of the percentage of black single mothers, after a 30-plus-year upward climb.
In fact, whatever its evils, the War on Drugs doesn’t take us far in explaining prison racial disparities. That’s not the impression you’ll get from the punditry class. “More than half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes in 2010,” goes a typical formulation, from the Huffington Post. It’s true, as far as it goes—but “federal prisoners” make up only about 14 percent of all incarcerated men. In the far larger state system, the majority of black men are doing time for violent crimes. Between the federal and state system, almost two and a half times the number of black men are serving sentences for murder, assault, and the like than they are for using and selling drugs. Today, violent criminals continue to make up by far the largest cohort of the freshman class of prisoners—black, white, and Hispanic.
The preponderance of violent prisoners muddies another plank of the missing-men theory: that mass incarceration of black adults has harmed black children. Researchers have made a compelling case that when fathers go to prison, their absence takes a toll on their kids. Boys, especially, have more behavioral problems, including aggressive acting out and lower educational achievement. But the lessons of those findings are far from clear. You can construct a reasonable argument that the children of men sentenced for drug offenses—and the communities they live in—would be better off if fewer fathers were behind bars. When it comes to men prone to violence, though, that supposition is ambiguous, at best.
The difficult truth avoided by most missing-men adherents is that men doing prison time are part of a larger population that doesn’t provide much in the way of paternal care, even if they never were locked up. According to research from the Fragile Families project, the vast majority of poor black fathers are unmarried, though it’s also the case that those in jail are the least likely to be married. That same population is less likely to be living with their children and their children’s mother than unmarried white or Hispanic fathers, a fact that lessens their sons’ and daughters’ chances in life. It’s true that black nonresidential fathers have been found to be more involved with their kids in the early years than comparable white and Hispanic dads. But that only lasts until the kids are nine or so; after that, poor black fathers are actually more likely to have exited their children’s lives than other men—another blow to children’s well-being. Part of the reason for this is “multi-partner fertility”—social-science-speak for having children by more than one partner. Multi-partner fertility, with the complex families it creates, is extremely common in poor black neighborhoods. (Again, it’s twice as prevalent among incarcerated men.) Serial parental relationships, breakups, disappearances, a line of step-siblings and parents: they’re all part of what sociologists Laura Tach and Kathryn Edin call the “family-go-round.” These traits are linked to the same behavioral problems experienced by boys whose fathers have been jailed.
