In the atlas, Poverty in America: One Nation Pulling Apart, we focused on the link between the challenges facing the black family and the plight of black men, especially men between the ages of 18-35. Reporting in the New York Times, Erik Eckholm cites three new studies that echo the findings of the Atlas and underscore the challenges facing black men in “Black Males Left Behind” (edited by Ronald B. Mincy, Urban Institute Press, 2006), “Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men” (Harry J. Holzer, Peter Edelman and Paul Offner, Urban Institute Press, 2006) and “Punishment and Inequality in America” (Bruce Western, Russell Sage Press, forthcoming).

Key findings include:

“The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990’s.

In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20’s were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated.

By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts.

Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20’s were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990’s and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20’s who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30’s, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school”.

Over the decade of the 1990s, public programs focused on reducing the welfare rolls of women, especially African American women with children. Despite the severity of the statistics referenced in the Atlas and reported in Eckholm’s article about the fate of black men, no similar effort of the scale of welfare reform has been undertaken to assist black men in accessing the American labor market. As author Ronald Mincy laments in the article: “We spent $50 billion in efforts that produced the turnaround for poor women,” Mr. Mincy said. “We are not even beginning to think about the men’s problem on similar orders of magnitude.”