CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

In her timely new book, Jill Leovy examines one of the most disturbing facts about life in America: that African-American males are, as she puts it, "just 6 percent of the country's population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered." Leovy describes neighborhoods steeped in pain: A mother, dressed in a baggy T‑shirt adorned with her murdered son's picture, spends all day indoors, too terrified to step outside; the brother of a homicide victim purposely meanders through violent streets in the hopes that he too will meet the same fate; grieving parents all wear the same haunted expression, the empty stare that one police chaplain calls "homicide eyes." Leovy's focus is South Los Angeles, though similar stories abound in many of the nation's poorest communities. [...]

As Leovy sees it, the problem in a place like Watts is not only the high homicide rate, but the fact that so many people who commit murder are never punished. In the 13 years before the homicide that opens her book, she writes, "a suspect was arrested in 38 percent of the 2,677 killings involving black male victims in the city of Los Angeles." This lack of accountability is the primary cause, she argues, of the high homicide rate in some African-­American neighborhoods: "Where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death," she writes, "homicide becomes endemic."

There are more than 2.2 million people now confined in American prisons and jails, and yet, in her view, the criminal justice system is not only"oppressive" but also "inadequate." "Forty years after the civil rights movement, impunity for the murder of black men remained America's great, though mostly invisible, race problem," she writes. "The institutions of criminal justice, so remorseless in other ways in an era of get-tough sentencing and 'preventive' policing" -- like stop-and-frisk -- "remained feeble when it came to answering for the lives of black murder victims."

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