Incarceration Rates Up, Graduation Rates Down: Reverse the Trend
Saving young Black men
     The ‘We’ that Strong referred to is a group of people from the education and criminal justice fields who reside in the five Wisconsin cities with the highest
number of young African American men who were convened by Professor Joe Lomax, a criminal justice professor at UW-Platteville. Since April 2007, this group
has been meeting monthly to look at the seemingly intractable problems young Black men face and brainstorm for solutions to those problems. The five cities
are Madison, Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and Beloit.
     Strong feels that this problem has been ignored by the media until recently when the Urban League’s Beyond the Tipping Point was published and the
Governor’s Commission on Racial Disparities issued its report. And he is deeply fearful of the outcome if the community fails to respond to these alarming trends.
“If we don’t start doing something now to really get at the root of what is causing this to become such a problem, we’re going to lose a whole generation of kids,”
Strong predicted. “They are going to be gone and lost forever. They will be here. They just won’t be productive citizens. They’ll be behind bars and that is not
where we need them to be. Clearly as the numbers indicate when we look at the rates of incarceration, the numbers are just staggering. And that’s going to
continue to increase if some serious intervention is not put into place.”
     It’s not that these young men aren’t capable of performing academically; it’s just that the students face a “perfect storm” of problems at home, at school and
in the community that lead to the alarming numbers of young Black men who are not completing school and are ending up in the juvenile justice system.
     Recently, Strong saw the problem close up once again when he was a mentor in Tenia Jenkins’ African American Male Pedagogy class at West High
School. “A lot of the kids we were mentoring were kids who were extremely bright,” Strong said. “They could process things. The problem was they didn’t feel
connected to the school. For whatever reason, that connection between those students and the school wasn’t there. So we have to figure out a way to engage
these kids and keep them engaged. Somewhere along the line, we are losing them. I’m not sure where that breakdown is coming from, but somewhere down the
line we are losing these kids and they are getting disinterested in school and are becoming more and more involved with gangs and drugs and other forms of
juvenile delinquency. We have to figure out a way to keep these kids engaged. And I think the earlier we start, the better. I think once kids have gotten into high
school, if they don’t see education as having any value or meaning in their life, you are going to be pretty hard pressed to convince them otherwise. So the key is
to get to them young and impress upon them how important it is to stay in school, stay out of trouble and get a good education.”
     “Once you are in the system, when you look at the stat that says three out of five African American men are on some form of supervision, that’s amazing,”
Strong continued. “You have a group of five guys hanging around and three of them are on paper for some reason, that’s disheartening. I think there is a way we
can reverse this trend and we can get to these kids earlier so they don’t make the mistake of thinking these short term gain is something that is going to benefit
them. If we can impress on them early enough that isn’t the route they want to go, we’ll keep them out of the system and keep them in school.”
For the past five months, the group that Lomax put together has been planning a statewide conference called “Incarceration Rates Up, Graduation Rates Down:  
Reversing the Trend,” which will be held July 24-25 on the UW-Platteville campus. The purpose of the conference is to create strategies that will begin to get at
the roots problems that young Black men face. The conference speakers include Dr. Pamela Oliver, a UW-Madison sociology professor who has done extensive
work in the area of racial disparity in criminal justice and Carolyn Stanford-Taylor, assistant state superintendent of public education.
     “We’re trying to attract people from many fields and not just criminal justice and education,” Strong emphasized. “We want a broad spectrum of people to
show up for this. Anyone who has a concern about young people is encouraged to attend this workshop. We want parents and the biggest constituency, the kids.
We want to make sure they are plugged into this and we want their feedback and hear what they have to say. I think what happens so much is we start looking at a
problem that involves kids, but we don’t involve the kids in any of the decision-making in terms of what we are going to do. We’re really trying to involve kids,
getting them plugged in early and finding out what their ideas are. We want to learn what their experiences are. You would be surprised at some of the things you
hear from young people about what they have gone through even at an early age that can really help us look at some solutions to this problem.”
     The conference will serve as a springboard to the development of a coalition of people from the five cities who are committed to combating the complex
problems that young Black men face. “We’re going to meet as a whole on the first day and then we are going to cluster the people from the five cities together
and have them go back to their respective cities and try to implement some of the strategies that we come up with on how we can combat and reverse these
trends,” Strong said. “Hopefully, we’re going to have more conferences like this,” Strong said. “We’re hoping to bring workshops to the five cities so we can spread
it around and get more involvement from anyone.”
     It is said that it takes a village to raise a child. It is going to take a city to solve the problems that young Black men face in today’s society.

     Before July 9, the cost of the two-day conference is $100, which includes food, lodging, conference materials and snacks. After July 9, the cost is $150.
Continuing education units (CEU) are available for attendance at the workshop. Registrants may register on-line by visiting http://www.peopleware.net/index.cfm.
For more information about the conference, contact Wayne Strong at WStrong904@aol.com
By Jonathan Gramling

      Wayne Strong, a lieutenant with the Madison Police Department, has seen the problems
facing young Black men up close and personal. Strong grew up in Racine in a single parent
household. “I had some brushes with the law when I was young and I quickly turned my life around
because I knew that I didn’t want that route for myself,” Strong said in an interview with The
Capital City Hues. “I had to struggle and scratch and claw and fight to try to accomplish things, it
made it more difficult. But I think it made me a better person because I realize that if I didn’t do
something to try to better my own life that no one was going to do that for me. I had to take the
steps necessary that were going to get me to the place where I wanted to be and I could be of
some benefit to young kids growing up in similar situations that I grew up in.”
      Strong has also seen the problems during his 19 year career with the police department. He is
distressed by the number of young Black men entering the Juvenile Reception Center and the
number who are being suspended and expelled by the Madison schools. “If you can’t stay in
school, then you can’t graduate,” Strong emphasized. “Subsequently what we are saying is those
kids who are not able to stay in school are left pretty much out in the community and they are
getting in a lot of trouble. The effect of that and perhaps it is an unintended consequence; most
of these kids are ending up in the juvenile justice system.”
Wayne Strong, a lieutenant in the Madison Police
Department, is deeply concerned about the low
graduation and high incarceration rates of African
American young men.