ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the effects of the criminalization and incarceration of black males as a barrier to the formation of family, community solidarity, and the maintenance of Africana Studies. There has been a gap between black females and males on a number of social variables. Nowhere in Africana has there been more lament than with respect to the gap between female and male educational achievement. One study of black males is schools and the making of black masculinity documents the role of social structures in producing black males as "bad boys"; that is, social processes that result in the criminalization of black males. The imprisioning of black males functions to disrupt black communities. Police contact, jail, and prison experience reduces employment, lifelong earnings, voting rights, and the chances of marriage; at the same time it increases sexually transmitted diseases, illicit drug use, morbidity, and mortality.
