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| Inequality boom |
| By Sarah Etter, News Reporter |
| Published: 02/26/2007 |
Bruce Western didn't intend to study incarceration. In fact, the Princeton University researcher was analyzing labor market inequalities when he realized that another inequality was happening in America's prisons. When he delved even further into his research, he found a tangled web that linked incarceration, minorities, unemployment and failed marriages.
“From a comparative perspective, the growth in imprisonment in the United States is extraordinarily unusual. America just has no parallel in civilized countries when it comes to these statistics,” says Western, also a sociology professor at Princeton. “But when I looked closer at the numbers, I saw the growth in incarceration was having a large effect on patterns of racial inequality. It has an impact that lasts much longer than a prison sentence.” Western continued to research the complex impact of incarceration and compiled his research into the comprehensive book, Punishment and Inequality in America, which examines the prison boom over the last 30 years and its effects on more than just crime rates. Western found that 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs born during the 1960s have spent time behind bars. Additionally, his research shows that the ballooning prison population has only reduced crime by about one-tenth. Western also examines how these incarceration rates impact the rest of society. He hopes his charts, graphs and estimations might serve as a wake up call for criminal justice professionals, legislators and corrections officials. Corrections.com spoke with Western to find out more about the numbers he crunched, the facts he found and the future of incarceration. Corrections.com: Your book provides an overarching picture of the increasing imprisonment of minorities, and the effect of that incarceration on marriages, families and society as a whole. Why is this a crucial time to review these statistics? Western: This is an extremely important time to look at this issue. The incarceration rate is now historically extraordinarily high and for some groups in the population, specifically young African American men, going to prison has just become the normal part of life. The problem is very urgent from that point of view. I think we are seeing a change in criminal justice politics right now, so there is an opening to reconsider the way policy is developed. CC: As you've pointed out, the crime rate has dropped but we continue to incarcerate more people. Why? Western: One big change is sentencing. Sentencing policies are very different now from the mid-70s when the growth in imprisonment started. Incarceration has now become the presumptive sentence for a felony conviction. That's very different from 30 years ago. We rely so heavily on imprisonment now and we prosecute drug crimes much more harshly. These two things keep the incarceration rate high even though the crime is low. CC: What are your theories as to why we might be incarcerating a disparate number of minorities? Western: There are two underlying conditions for minorities being incarcerated; one is there were big economic changes in the 1970s which created really severe employment problems for young minority men in inner cities. Those problems have not been solved. You have a large group of young idle men who tend to be more involved in crime, not always serious crime. They are exposed to the scrutiny of police. That's one part of the story. The second part of the story is that these young men don't have good employment opportunities and are concentrated in urban areas. A lot of their daily life is much more public than those living in suburban areas. The way urban policing is conducted and how it differs from policing in the suburbs, these young men tend to be more involved in crime because they are idler and policed more intensively simply by being in urban areas rather than suburban. CC: What impact does incarceration have on divorce rates? Western: This is the big untold cost of the American prison boom. Men who go to prison are less likely to get married, and are at much greater risk of divorce and separation if they are married. They are likely to earn lower wages, less likely to help contribute to a family. There is a massive social cost not just for the men in the system but also for their families and the communities from which they come. Many times, this goes sort of under the radar because people don't think about how important it is to have a family structure in low income areas. CC: What statistics surprised you? Western: The work we did on lifetime risks of imprisonment yielded for me very surprising results. On some level, everyone knows incarceration rates for young black men are very high but when you actually calculate the numbers, you see that men who were born in the late 1960s, without high school degrees, are 60 percent more likely to go to prison at some point in their lives. That was just an extraordinary number. Those kinds of figures made me think the prison boom has really effected significant change in racial relations in America. For me and my collaborators, we felt that we were discovering a new pathway through adulthood for these young African American men with low levels of schooling. I think within this community, there is a strong understanding of how significant the criminal justice system has become in their lives. I don't think that is widely understood outside that community. These statistics are providing us with a glimpse into that social experience. CC: A recent study by The Pew Charitable Trusts indicates that in the next five years, the prison population will triple and cost roughly $27 billion dollars. Are you hopeful this could improve? Western: I'm pessimistic. In the analysis in my book, there were two drivers behind the growth in incarceration; one is that young, low-education men, particularly minorities, have very poor economic opportunities. The other is the appetite for punitive criminal justice among voters and policy makers. I don't think these conditions are abating. Until the economic opportunities for the men going to prison improves, and until we can adopt a more merciful attitude towards criminal punishment, incarceration rates will stay very high. CC: Some researchers believe the growth of the prison system can be attributed to corrections as a business with a desire to make money. Do you agree? Western: Some people have given that theory a lot of weight. If you have a $60 billion correctional voucher, there are going to be vested interests in keeping the correctional budget high. I have to say I don't think that's been the main driver behind the growth from my research. We see it occasionally with CO unions now and again, or corporations that profit from providing services to prisoners or communities that have a prison in their area. But those vested interests have not been behind the growth; they have become a by-product of the penal system becoming very large. CC: What do you hope people will take away from your book? Western: One of the things I'm trying to do in my book is get people to view the growth of the American penal system as being more about the problems of crime in America. Also, in a really fundamental way, the growth is about the problems of social inequality in America and particularly the disadvantage of poor communities in the inner cities. For me, the story of the American prison boom is as much about American social inequality as it is about crime. We need to see two kinds of policy changes. We need to pull back from the very heavy reliance on incarceration, and we could do this, I think, with drug offenders at very little risk of public safety. That's what studies show. The other thing we can do is think seriously about improving employment for young, poor inner city residents. This is the other big precondition for these incarceration rates. We've done it with welfare reform for poor single mothers. Poor young men have never been the recipients of efforts to improve employment opportunities. Very simply put, they need jobs. Related Resources: Got an extra $27 billion?, 2/19 |
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