Pager excerpt: the credentialing of stigma
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/644839.html
At the start of the 1970s, incarceration appeared to be a practice in
decline. Criticized for its overuse and detrimental effects,
practitioners and reformers looked to community-based alternatives as
a more promising strategy for managing criminal offenders. A 1967
report published by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and
Administration of Justice concluded: “Life in many institutions is at
best barren and futile, at worst unspeakably brutal and degradingà.
The conditions in which [prisoners] live are the poorest possible
preparation for their successful reentry into society, and often
merely reinforces in them a pattern of manipulation or
destructiveness.” The commission’s primary recommendation involved
developing “more extensive community programs providing special,
intensive treatment as an alternative to institutionalization for
both juvenile and adult offenders.” Echoing this sentiment, a 1973
report by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice
Standards and Goals took a strong stand against the use of
incarceration. “The prison, the reformatory, and the jail have
achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming
evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent
it.” The commission firmly recommended that “no new institutions for
adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should
be closed.” Following what appeared to be the current of the time,
historian David Rothman in 1971 confidently proclaimed, “We have been
gradually escaping from institutional responses and one can foresee
the period when incarceration will be used still more rarely than it
is today.”
[…]
As the cycle of incarceration and release continues, an ever greater
number of young men face prison as an expected marker of adulthood.
But the expansive reach of the criminal justice system has not
affected all groups equally. More than any other group, African
Americans have felt the impact of the prison boom, comprising more
than 40 percent of the current prison population while making up just
12 percent of the U.S. population. At any given time, roughly 12
percent of all young black men between the ages of twenty-five and
twenty-nine are behind bars, compared to less than 2 percent of white
men in the same age group; roughly a third are under criminal justice
supervision. Over the course of a lifetime, nearly one in three young
black men–and well over half of young black high school dropouts–
will spend some time in prison. According to these estimates, young
black men are more likely to go to prison than to attend college,
serve in the military, or, in the case of high school dropouts, be in
the labor market. Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among
our nation’s most marginalized groups. Rather it has now become a
normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.
There is reason to believe that the consequences of these trends
extend well beyond the prison walls, with widespread assumptions
about the criminal tendencies among blacks affecting far more than
those actually engaged in crime. Blacks in this country have long
been regarded with suspicion and fear; but unlike progressive trends
in other racial attitudes, associations between race and crime have
changed little in recent years. Survey respondents consistently rate
blacks as more prone to violence than any other American racial or
ethnic group, with the stereotype of aggressiveness and violence most
frequently endorsed in ratings of African Americans. The stereotype
of blacks as criminals is deeply embedded in the collective
consciousness of white Americans, irrespective of the perceiver’s
level of prejudice or personal beliefs.
While it would be impossible to trace the source of contemporary
racial stereotypes to any one factor, the disproportionate growth of
the criminal justice system in the lives of young black men–and the
corresponding media coverage of this phenomenon, which presents an
even more skewed representation–has likely played an important role.
Experimental research shows that exposure to news coverage of a
violent incident committed by a black perpetrator not only increases
punitive attitudes about crime but further increases negative
attitudes about blacks generally. The more exposure we have to images
of blacks in custody or behind bars, the stronger our expectations
become regarding the race of assailants or the criminal tendencies of
black strangers.
The consequences of mass incarceration then may extend far beyond the
costs to the individual bodies behind bars, and to the families that
are disrupted or the communities whose residents cycle in and out.
The criminal justice system may itself legitimate and reinforce
deeply embedded racial stereotypes, contributing to the persistent
chasm in this society between black and white.
The Credentialing of Stigma
[…]