Western on incarceration
[I mentioned the sociologist Bruce Western as someone who’s
investigated the link between unemployment & jail. Here’s an
interview with him. Sorry for not inserting Q/A, but it’s easy to
figure out.]
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.
Elizabeth Henderson is a former Prospect intern.