美国种族矛盾问题.doc

美国种族矛盾问题依旧难解！ Not so long ago, the US believed it had cracked the violent crime epidemic. “Zero tolerance” and “three strikes and you’re out” were the mantras of the 1990s. Declining homicide rates were its product. Today, as the riots intensify in Baltimore following the death of yet another unarmed black man in police custody, such verities no longer hold.信条不再存在 不久之前，美国曾相信自己已经攻克了暴力犯罪这种流行病。“零容忍”和“三振出局”是美国社会上世纪90年代反复重申的信条，其结果是凶杀率下降。如今，信条已失效。在巴尔的摩，又一名手无寸铁的黑人男性在被警察局拘留期间死亡，之后爆发的骚乱正愈演愈烈。 With 2.3m people behind bars, zero tolerance has delivered the largest incarcerated population in the world. US prisons are fuller than those of autocratic China, which has a population more than four times as big. It has also unpicked some of the gains of the 1960s civil rights era. Tens of thousands of black men are in jail for offences that merit little more than a slap on the wrist for their white counterparts. It is little use pointing to the fact that the US has elected its first black president. A generation believes it has been stigmatised and their complaints ignored. As Martin Luther King said before he was assassinated in 1968: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” 美国有230万人在监狱，“零容忍”政策产生了全世 界最大的囚犯人口。美国的监狱比威权制度下的中国还要满，而中国人口是美国的4倍多。这一政策还让上世纪60年代民权运动时代取得的部分进步付之东流。数 万名黑人男性因为微小的过错坐牢，而犯同样过错的白人男性受到的责罚不会比打手心重多少。美国选出了首位黑人总统也说明不了什么。一代黑人认为自己背负着 烙印，他们的不满无人理会。如马丁?路德?金(Martin Luther King) 1968年遇刺前所说：“暴动是不被倾听者的语言(A riot is the language of the unheard)。” Yet amid the gloom, there are signs that US politics is coming to terms with the scale of the challenge. Bill Clinton, who as president was the chief author of the 1990s penal reforms, recently admitted they had “overstepped the mark”. In his day, no politician could afford to be seen as “soft on crime”. Today, both parties accept the need to reduce the US jail population and give those with criminal records a fairer chance at starting over. 然而黑暗中的一抹亮色是，有迹象显示，美国政界已开始应对这个巨大的难题。比尔?克林顿(Bill Clinton) 担任总统时