America Incarcerated

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The effects of imprisonment on people’s life chances are profound. For incarcerated black men, hourly wages are 10 percent lower after prison than before. For all incarcerated men, the number of weeks worked per year falls by at least a third after their release.

So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year. While they are locked up, these felons are stigmatized—they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—often need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation in which the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.

I have been exploring the issue of causes, of why we took the punitive turn that has resulted in mass incarceration. But even if the racial argument about causes is inconclusive, the racial consequences are clear. To be sure, in the United States, as in any society, public order is maintained by the threat and use of force. We enjoy our good lives only because we are shielded by law and order, which keep the unruly at bay. Yet in this society, to a degree virtually unmatched in any other, those bearing the brunt of order enforcement belong in vastly disproportionate numbers to historically marginalized racial groups. Crime and punishment in America has a color.

In his fine study “Punishment and Inequality in America” (2006), the Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western powerfully describes the scope, nature, and consequences of contemporary imprisonment. He finds that the extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates is greater than in any other major arena of American social life. At eight to one, the black-to-white ratio of incarceration rates dwarfs the two-to-one ratio of unemployment rates, the three-to-one ratio of nonmarital childbearing, the two-to-one ratio of infant-mortality rates, and the one-to-five ratio of net worth. While 3 out of 200 young whites were incarcerated in 2000, 1 in 9 young blacks were. A black male resident of California is more likely to go to a state prison than to a state college.

The scandalous truth is that the police and penal apparatus are now the primary contact between black American men and the American state. Among black male high school dropouts ages 20 to 40, a third were locked up on any given day in 2000, fewer than 3 percent belonged to a union, and less than one quarter were enrolled in any kind of social program. Coercion is the most salient meaning of government for these young men. Western estimates that nearly 60 percent of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 were sent to prison on a felony conviction at least once before they reached the age of 35.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print