The contempt for blacks on the streets is carried into the contempt for blacks in their homes, for black family life. The black man's home is not his castle, even less the black woman's hers. There is nothing inviolable about the black family. The proof is in the numbers. The system is justified, it closes in on itself, it brooks no interference from outside - the indifference to black life becomes a fact of prison life.
Suicide offers the only release.
And yet, when it comes to young black men, the evidence is of a marked tendency towards diagnoses based on racial stereotypes rather than on individual case histories. Racial diagnosis, it would appear, over-rides clinical diagnosis. Instead, the 'illness' which might well have been caused by the individual's inability to bear the brutal brunt of racism is further compounded by the racism implicit in the diagnosis and cure. And, so far from getting the care he needs, the patient is even further entered into a syndrome of un-caring from which his 'illness' first sought escape. The only escape now is the last.