<http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=12277>
Locked Out
Our system of mass incarceration affects more than you think. TAP talks to Bruce Western, author of Punishment and Inequality in America.
Elizabeth Henderson | December 5, 2006 | web only
The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. The impact of the U.S. penal system, not only on the lives of prisoners but also on the nation's civic and economic health, is far-reaching. In Punishment and Inequality in America, Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, examines the detrimental effect of the prison system on young black male populations and the implications of mass incarceration for the state of the nation.
How did you become interested in studying the link between the prison system and the creation of inequality?
When I got into this project I was really interested in labor market inequality, not the criminal justice system or crime. I'd been looking at social policy and labor unions in Western Europe and North America. The striking thing for me was that the U.S. welfare state was very small in comparison to the European [systems]; and the United States had a huge number of poor young men involved in the criminal justice system. This got me thinking about the penal system as an institution that affected the poor in the United States in a way that was similar to the effect of welfare state structures on the lives of the poor in Europe.
In your book, you describe mass imprisonment in the United States as part of a cycle of instability, crime, and inequality. Can you briefly describe the key elements of this cycle and what sustains it?
At the current time there are very high rates of incarceration, which means that young black men with low levels of schooling can fully expect to go to prison at some point during young adulthood. After they come out of prison, they do very poorly in the labor market and their family lives are disrupted. A steady job and a stable family life -- and, particularly, a stable marriage -- are important keys to desistance from crime. Because the penal system has these social impacts on economic opportunities, the involvement of families in crime is perpetuated over the life course by incarceration. We suspect, though I don't look at this directly in the book, that involvement in crime and the criminal justice system is perpetuated from one generation to another.
One of the striking findings concerns how the current penal system increases inequality between non-educated and educated black men. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Over the last 30 years the increase in the risk of imprisonment has happened among men with less than a college education. The racial disparity in incarceration, which is very large, has not increased markedly over the last 30 years. Blacks are still seven times more likely to go to prison than whites. This means that within the black community you've got a group of college-educated men who basically were not affected by the prison boom at all. So the prison boom has really driven a wedge into the black community, dividing those with little education from those who have gone to college.
Why have levels of incarceration increased so markedly?
There are political and economic causes. On the economic front, the employment opportunities for young, unskilled men living in inner cities eroded significantly through the 1960s and the 1970s. So now you have a large group of young men without much schooling who experience very high rates of unemployment. And so you have this chronically idle population of young, mostly minority men in inner cities. On the political side, there have been changes in politics and changes in policies. In response to civil rights activism, the erosion of white privilege (particularly in the South), and the real increase in crime rates, voters became increasingly open to appeals to law and order that were tacitly racialized. From the late 1960s onwards, the Republican party became very good at making these law and order appeals, which ultimately resulted in policies that pushed criminal justice in a much more punitive direction. In general, as the social and economic forces are pushing up the imprisonment rate, the function of the penal system is massively expanding. The penal system used to be reserved for very serious repeat offenders, but as the penal system got larger, prisons became used to solve a whole variety of social problems, such as drug addiction, urban disorder, and chronic idleness among young men.
You contrast the current prison system's goal of punishment with the rehabilitative aims of American prisons in the 1830s, when they were intended as “instruments for repairing citizenship.”
I think that in the current period, the penal system functions in reverse fashion. Instead of drawing people at the margins of society back into the mainstream, the penal system walls them off from mainstream society. Because going to prison has a whole range of social effects on your economic opportunities and your family life, imprisonment makes you a second-class citizen. The prison system is restricting citizenship rather than repairing it.
How significantly does this restriction of citizenship prevent prisoners who are released from participating in a democratic society?
The effects of imprisonment are quite profound. In a legal sense, there is a literal erosion of citizenship because the rights you have as an ex-felon are more limited than the rights of someone who has never been in prison. In a more general sense, you also suffer the social effects of imprisonment. You're at higher risk of unemployment, you earn less, you're more likely to experience divorce or separation if you are married. If you're not married, you're less likely to become so. The quality of life that you can expect as a full member of society is different from that of someone who has never been imprisoned.
What about the effect of mass imprisonment on crime rates?
Recently, there have been a number of influential studies that argue that the growth in the penal system throughout the 1990s helps to explain a large part of the substantial drop in crime in the 1990s. I went back and closely looked at the data; I estimated that the growth in imprisonment during the 1990s only explained about a tenth of the decline in crime rates. At one level this is a bit puzzling, because the prison population increased a lot, but the drop in crime as a consequence of this growth in imprisonment was small. I think that's because imprisonment has become a normal part of young adulthood for low education black men and this has reduced the stigma of incarceration and reduced its power to deter crime.
What were some of the other striking elements of your research?
There were two things that I found particularly striking. The first was the very high rates of incarceration among young black men, in particular if they haven't been to college. When we actually calculated the estimates, we were finding that one in three black men now in their mid-30s had prison records, and that one in three black men who hadn't been to college now had prison records; and if they had dropped out of high school the number was two in three. These were astonishingly high numbers and initially we thought we'd made mistakes in our calculations. We only have to go back 20 years to find a time when the penal system was not a pervasive presence in the lives of young black men.
The other surprising element involved reexamining labor market trends, particularly during the 1990s. The story about the 1990s was that economic growth and the labor market were so strong, particularly at the end of the 1990s, that the market was finally providing benefits to very marginal workers -- young men with less than a college education -- and their employment rates and wages were apparently increasing. All of these statistics, of course, don't take into account the fact that a growing share of that population is increasingly in prison and doesn't show up in any economic statistics. Once you take account of the growing numbers of poor young men in prison, you can see that black men obtained no real economic benefit at all from the economic expansion of the 1990s. This was a pretty surprising finding because there was a consensus that very strong economic growth could provide benefits to the furthest margins of the labor market.
Near the end of your book, you seem resigned to the fact that the system of mass imprisonment is going to continue despite the renewed interest in rehabilitative programs for prisoners.
I think there is renewed interest in rehabilitative programming. The pendulum is swinging back a little bit from the heavy emphasis on retribution and incapacitation in corrections. And there's a lot of interest right now in reentry programs that provide transitional employment and housing and so on to people coming out of prison. I'm skeptical that this renewed interest in rehabilitation can roll back mass imprisonment. The forces that propelled the growth in the penal system were a terrible employment situation for young unskilled men and a keen punitive appetite on the part of voters and policy makers. Both of those conditions are still strongly in evidence, and so although there are signs of a more progressive approach to corrections, the conditions that produced the prison boom are still alive and well.
What policy recommendations do you have for breaking the cycle of mass imprisonment?
We need to do at least two things. We need to re-examine our current approach to drug control policy. At the moment, incarceration is the presumptive sentence for drug offenders. I think we need to look at that and ask: Is this really the best way to spend our criminal justice dollars? Particularly in light of evidence that shows that many drug offenders really pose little risk of violent crime to the community. But changes in sentencing policy are not going to be enough. The fundamental problem is there is still no real functioning economy in poor urban neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. And as long as a shortage of jobs remains, as long as we have these very high rates of unemployment among young unskilled men, we're still going to get very high rates of involvement of these young men in the criminal justice system. So I think ultimately we can't avoid trying to solve the social problems that we've so far only tried to solve through criminal justice policy with social policy.
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Elizabeth Henderson is a former Prospect intern.