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Nevertheless, the extraordinarily high black prison population has remained a matter of
national controversy and a source of special pain for blacks themselves. Some critics
believe that there are far too many Americans, and especially blacks, in prison for relatively
minor and nonviolent drug offenses. At the same time, declines in violent crime in a
number of large cities have paved the way for a revitalization of inner-city neighborhoods.
While the dynamics of crime reduction are complex, one factor, many believe, is the large
number of criminals who are in prison and off the streets.

Neighborhood Desegregation

Since the beginning of the modern civil rights era, school desegregation has been a central
objective in the strategy for racial equality. Indeed, the landmark Supreme Court decision
that desegregated the schools, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), is regarded as a
galvanizing event in the drive for change. After Brown, civil rights advocates launched a
broad-based campaign for school integration that included lawsuits and civil disobedience.
Despite fierce and sometimes violent resistance in some communities, legal school
segregation was effectively dismantled by the end of the 1960s.
The end of legal segregation has not, however, brought about the widespread school
integration that civil rights advocates had hoped for. The principal reason is the
persistently high level of neighborhood segregation. To be sure, studies conducted by the
Census Bureau and the Brookings Institution indicate that racial isolation in major cities
has continued to decline through the years. But the pace of change is slow; America has
made much more progress in integrating the workplace, the media, universities, and the
criminal justice system than it has in achieving neighborhoods that are racially mixed.
Citing figures provided by the Census Bureau for the year 2000, Douglas Massey, a
professor of sociology at Princeton University, writes that “while segregation has moved
downward since 1980, indices remain extreme in the nation’s largest urban black
communities, especially in the Northeast and the Midwest.” According to the Census
Bureau, the most segregated cities are Detroit, Michigan; Newark, New Jersey; Milwaukee,
Wisconsin; New York City; and Chicago, Illinois. Ironically, neighborhood segregation is less
extreme in the big cities of the South.19
Massey, whose writings have been influential in the debate over residential segregation,
contends that the failure to create conditions that facilitate housing integration has
contributed to racial inequality by leading to high levels of school segregation. He cites a
Harvard University study which indicates that racial isolation in the schools actually
increased during the 1990s, and asserts that one-sixth of African American students
attend schools that are 99 percent black. Massey writes, “Segregation inevitably
concentrates poverty, social disorder, and poor health in dysfunctional schools that place
African Americans, and increasingly Hispanics, at a severe competitive disadvantage in
attempting to enter America’s better colleges and universities.”20
The causes of neighborhood segregation are difficult to pin down, although obviously the
relatively low earnings of blacks and Hispanics is an important factor. Massey and
advocacy organizations like the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) contend that
outright discrimination plays an important role in preventing blacks from leaving the inner

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