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Philadelphia 'lost' and found

My Daily News article on the 36,000 "missing" young black males in Philadelphia, and what can be done.

With the NAACP in town, this seemed like the perfect time to take a deep dive into a story that first broke during the spring -- the case of Philadelphia's "missing" 36,000 young black men. "Missing" is in quotes since we know where they are, for the most part -- in Pennsylvania's ever-growing gulag of prisons, or dead before their time. So what's the deal?

But experts say any conversations about race relations in America in 2015 and beyond won't get far without coming to terms with a type of diaspora that is peculiar to the nation's inner cities - a cycle of poverty, violence and drugs that has acted like a neutron bomb to eliminate young men in their late teens, 20s and 30s.

James Peterson, director of Africana studies and associate professor of English at Lehigh Unversity, said mass incarceration policies are the crux of the problem - thanks to the "war on drugs" and what he calls "certain myths that were propagated in the 1970s and '80s about black male criminality."

Only in recent years has our politics started to focus on the fact that America has the world's highest rate of incarceration and that a disproportionately large amount of the inmates are black. A 2013 Pew Research Center study found that black men in the U.S. are six times more likely than white men to be behind bars.

But while the stats have prompted a slow turn toward alternatives to prison, or marijuana decriminalization, experts say the problem of missing black men will be hard to tackle as long as Americans can't agree on the root causes.