http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexingto ... lack_woman
THIS week's column looks at how locking up huge numbers of young black men makes it hard for black women to form stable relationships. Simply put, when there are more women than men in the dating pool, the men have all the power. An African-American man with a good job and no criminal record knows he is a hot commodity. He can get sex without offering commitment, so he is often reluctant to settle down, according to Audrey Chapman, a relationship counsellor and the author of books such as "Getting Good Loving".
The single black women I spoke to for the column were not happy about this. They all complained about a shortage of eligible black men. Some thought it might be partly because some black men were on the "down-low", ie they secretly have sex with men. But I doubt there is much difference between the proportion of black men and women who are gay, whereas we know there are huge differences in incarceration rates between the sexes.
A paper by Kerwin Charles and Ming Ching Luoh finds that the mass incarceration of males has a dreadful effect on women in the same "marriage market". (They divided America into 306 marriage markets, to reflect the fact that most people marry someone who is of the same race, roughly the same age and who lives nearby.) Tim Harford's book "The Logic of Life" has a more reader-friendly discussion of the subject.
This is a much more serious issue than most people realise, and yet another reason to reconsider America's extraordinarily harsh punishments for non-violent crimes. If conservatives care about family values, they should be appalled at what jail is doing to the black family.
Update: Several commenters (mostly under the column, not the blog post) have suggested that college-educated black women were never likely to marry the kind of black men who get locked up. This is true, but it does not refute my argument. The point, which I tried to explain in the first paragraph of the column, is that when you take out even a small number of men from the marriage market, there is a knock-on effect. A woman whose boyfriend is in jail poaches a new boyfriend from another woman, who in turn poaches from another woman, and so on, right up the status ladder. There aren't enough men to go around, so the women compete ferociously for their favours. The problem for college-educated black women is not that the man they want to marry is in jail. It is that the man they want to marry has so many offers of casual sex that he won't commit to a monogamous relationship.
Obviously, this would not be such a big problem if black and white Americans were more open to inter-racial marriages. That would be wonderful, but it is generally not the case.
Here is another statistics....44% of HIV infections is black women. (who have had the virus from black ex convicts) 