America Incarcerated

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Of course, drug usage rates and drug arrest rates needn’t be expected to be identical. Still, we do well to bear in mind that the social problem of illicit drug use is endemic to our whole society. Significantly, throughout the period 1979 to 2000, white high school seniors reported using drugs at a significantly higher rate than black high school seniors. High drug-usage rates in white, middle-class American communities in the early 1980s account for the urgency many citizens felt to mount a national attack on the problem. But how successful has the effort been, and at what cost?

Think of the cost this way: To save middle-class kids from the threat of a drug epidemic— one that might not even have existed by the time that drug incarceration began its rapid increase in the 1980s—we criminalized underclass kids. Arrests went up, but drug prices have fallen sharply over the past 20 years—suggesting that ratcheting up enforcement has not made drugs harder to get on the street. The strategy clearly wasn’t keeping drugs away from those who sought them. Not only are prices down, but the data show that drug-related visits to emergency rooms also rose steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

An interesting case in point is New York City. Analyzing arrests by residential neighborhood and police precinct, the criminologist Jeffrey Fagan and his colleagues Valerie West and Jan Holland found that incarceration was highest in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, though these were often not the neighborhoods in which crime rates were the highest. Moreover, they discovered a perverse effect of incarceration on crime: Higher incarceration in a given neighborhood in one year seemed to predict higher crime rates in that same neighborhood one year later. This growth and persistence of incarceration over time, the authors concluded, were due primarily to the drug enforcement practices of police and to sentencing laws that require imprisonment for repeat felons. Police scrutiny was more intensive and less forgiving in high-incarceration neighborhoods, and parolees returning to such neighborhoods were more closely monitored. Thus, discretionary police behavior led to a high and increasing rate of repeat prison admissions in the designated neighborhoods, even as crime rates fell.

Fagan, West, and Holland explain the effects of spatially concentrated antidrug-law enforcement in the contemporary American metropolis. Buyers may come from any neighborhood and any social stratum, but the sellers—at least the ones who can be readily found hawking their wares on street corners—come predominantly from the poorest, most nonwhite parts of the city. The police, with arrest quotas to meet, know precisely where to find them. The researchers conclude:

Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration. . . . Three mechanisms . . . contribute to and reinforce incarceration in neighborhoods: the declining economic fortunes of former inmates and the effects on neighborhoods where they tend to reside; resource and relationship strains on families of prisoners that weaken the family’s ability to supervise children; and voter disenfranchisement that weakens the political economy of neighborhoods.

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