A nation of jailers by glenn loury

The Benefits of Mass Incarceration Are Outweighed by the Negative Effects Criminal Justice, 2013 From Opposing Viewpoints in Context

"The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted in three fallacies of the tough-on-crime perspective."

In the following viewpoint, Bruce Western argues that the dramatic increase in the incarceration rate over the last few decades has resulted in only a modest decrease in crime while causing new problems. Western claims that mass imprisonment has harmed prisoners, their families, and their social groups. He contends that the money spent on incarceration is poorly spent and that the policy of mass incarceration rests on misguided views about criminality. Western is a professor of sociology and director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University. He is the author of Punishment and Inequality in America.

As you read, consider the following questions:

According to Western, how many people are in US prisons and jails?1.

How much money was spent in additional correctional spending from 1993 to 2001 to pay2. for half a million new prison inmates, according to the author?

Western claims that money spent on prison construction was diverted from what two3. programs that could have benefited the poor?

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the "basic human equality associated with full membership in a community." By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

The American Prison Boom

For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year [2007], Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a

remarkable observation, "With the world's largest prison population," he said, "our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity." Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison's significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb's hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the

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American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One in nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor's degree. The large black-white disparity in incarceration is unmatched by most other social indicators. Racial disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) are all significantly lower than the seven to one black-white ratio in incarceration rates.

Though lurid portrayals of black criminality are easy to find on the local news or reality TV, the deep class divisions in imprisonment may be less apparent. Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since 1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high school education. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five is incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go to prison before age thirty-five. The stigma of official criminality has become normal for these poorly educated black men, and they are thereby converted from merely disadvantaged into a class of social outsiders. These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.

The Effects of Incarceration

The effects of prison are not confined within its walls. Those coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face a narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little

and offer only a fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities in incarceration. In many cases, people with felony records are denied housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states, they are permanently denied the right to vote.

The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families. Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married. Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The family instability surrounding incarceration persists across generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and 25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on visiting day. In short, those with prison records and their families are something less than full members of society. To be young, black, and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom has produced mass incarceration—a level of imprisonment so vast and concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group.

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Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s, immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the civil rights

movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in the experience of African Americans in poor

neighborhoods, the advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection from

discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration undermined the project for full African American citizenship and revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute social disparity.

The Reduction in Crime

Skeptics may concede that mass incarceration injured social justice, but surely, they would contend, it contributed to the tremendous decline in crime through the 1990s. Indeed, the crime decline of the '90s produced a great improvement in public safety. From 1993 to 2001, the violent crime rate fell considerably, murder rates in big cities like New York and Los Angeles dropped by half or more, and

this progress in social well-being was recorded by rich and poor alike. Yet, when I analyzed crime rates in this period, I found that rising prison populations did not reduce crime by much. The growth in state imprisonment accounted for 2-5 percent of the decline in serious crime—one-tenth of the crime drop from 1993 to 2001. The remaining nine-tenths was due to factors like the increasing size of local police forces, the pacification of the drug trade following the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, and the

role of local circumstances that resist a general explanation.

So a modest decline in serious crime over an eight-year period was purchased for $53 billion in additional correctional spending and half a million new prison inmates: a large price to pay for a small reduction. If we add the lost earnings of prisoners to the family disruption and community instability produced by mass incarceration, we cannot help but acknowledge that a steep price was paid for a small improvement in public safety. Several examples further demonstrate that the boom may have been a waste because crime can be controlled without large increases in imprisonment. Violent crime in Canada, for example, also declined greatly through the 1990s, but Canadian incarceration rates

actually fell from 1991 to 1999. New York maintained particularly low crime rates through the 2000s, but has been one of the few states to cut its prison population in recent years.

More importantly, perhaps, the reduction in crime was accompanied by an array of new problems associated with mass incarceration. Those states that have sought reduced crime through mass incarceration find themselves faced with an array of problems associated with overreliance on imprisonment. How can poor communities with few resources absorb the return of 700,000 prisoners each year? How can states pay for their prisons while responding to the competing demands of higher education, Medicaid, and K-12 schools? How can we address the social costs—the broken homes, unemployment, and crime—that can follow from imprisonment? Questions such as these lead us to a more fundamental concern: How can mass imprisonment be reversed and American citizenship repaired?

The Origins of Mass Incarceration

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We can begin to tackle these issues by understanding how we got here. The origins of today's mass incarceration can be traced to basic political and economic shifts in the 1960s. On the economic side, the prison population swelled following the collapse of the urban manufacturing industry and subsequent cascade of social ills that swept poor inner-city neighborhoods. Serious crime—the traditional target of the penal system—was an important part of these urban social problems. Murder rates in large cities grew dramatically from 1965 to 1980. But in addition to the problem of serious crime, the penal system was used to manage many of the by-products of persistent poverty: untreated drug addiction and mental illness, homelessness, chronic idleness among young men, and social disorder. It was the management of these social problems, not serious crime, that fueled incarceration rates for drug users, public-order offenders, and parole violators.

As the social crisis of urban America supplied the masses for mass incarceration, the penal system itself became more punitive. The tough-on-crime message honed by the Republican Party in national politics since the [Barry] Goldwater campaign of 1964 spoke to the racial anxieties of white voters discomfited by civil rights protests and summertime waves of civil unrest felt in cities through the decade. Conservatives charged that liberals coddled criminals and excused crime with phony root

causes like poverty and unemployment. President [Richard] Nixon launched a war on crime, only to be surpassed by President [Ronald] Reagan's war on drugs, which applied the resources of federal law

enforcement to the problem of drug control. Policy experts abandoned rehabilitation, concluding that

prisons could only deter and warehouse those who would otherwise commit crime in society. These politics produced a revolution in criminal sentencing. Mandatory minimum prison sentences,

sentencing guidelines, parole abolition, and life sentences for third-time felons were widely adopted

through the 1980s. The no-nonsense, tough-on-crime politics reached a bipartisan apotheosis with President [Bill] Clinton's 1994 crime bill, which launched the largest prison construction project in the nation's history. As a result of these changes, prison time—as opposed to community supervision—became the main criminal sanction for felony offenders.

Three Fallacies

The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted in three fallacies of the tough-on- crime perspective. First, there is the fallacy of us and them. For tough-on-crime advocates, the innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals, and the prison works to separate us from them. The truth is that the criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons. Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioral staples of male youth. Most of the crime they

commit is perpetrated on each other. This is reflected most tragically in the high rates of homicide

victimization among males under age twenty-five, black males in particular. Some young men do become more seriously and persistently involved in crime, but neither the criminal justice system nor criminologists can predict who those serious offenders will be or when they will stop offending. Thus the power to police and punish cannot separate us from criminals with great distinction, but instead

flows along the contours of social inequality. Visible markers like age, skin color, and neighborhood become rough proxies for criminal threat. Small race and class differences in offending are amplified at each stage of criminal processing from arrest through conviction and sentencing. As a result, the prison walls we built with such industry in the 1980s and '90s did not keep out the criminal predators, but instead divided us internally, leaving our poorest communities with fewer opportunities to join the mainstream and deeply skeptical of the institutions charged with their safety.

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Second, there is the fallacy of personal defect. Tough-on-crime politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals. Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less human than the rest of us. The diagnosis of defective character points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative efforts, and justifying the mission of semipermanent incapacitation. The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled association of crime with race in political talk. But seeking criminality in defects of character, the architects of the prison boom ignored the great rise in urban youth unemployment that preceded the growth in murder rates in the 1960s and '70s. They ignored the illegal drug trade, which flourished to fill the vacuum of legitimate economic opportunity left by urban deindustrialization. They ignored, too, the fact that jobs are not just a source of economic opportunity but of social control that routinizes daily life and draws young men into a wide array of socially beneficial roles. Lastly, they ignored the bonds of mutual assistance that are only weakly sustained by communities of concentrated poverty. Thus young men would return home from prison only to easily surmount once again the same stunted social barriers to crime that contributed to their imprisonment in the first place.

The final fallacy of the tough-on-crime perspective is the myth of the free market. The free market fallacy sees the welfare state as pampering the criminal class and building expectations of something for nothing. Antipoverty programs were trimmed throughout the 1970s and '80s, and poor young men largely fell through the diminished safety net that remained. For free marketeers, the question was simply whether or not to spend public money on the poor—they did not anticipate that idle young men present a social problem. Without school, work, or military service, these poor young men were left on the street corner, sometimes acting disorderly and often fuelling fears of crime. We may have skimped on welfare, but we paid anyway, splurging on police and prisons. Because incarceration was so highly concentrated in particular neighborhoods and areas within them, certain city blocks received millions of dollars in "correctional investment"—spending on the removal of local residents by incarceration. These million-dollar blocks reveal a question falsely posed. We never faced a choice of whether to spend money on the poor; the dollars diverted from education and employment found their way to prison construction. Our political choice, it turned out, was not how much we spent on the poor, but what to spend it on.

Further Readings Books

Michelle Alexander The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010.

James Austin and John Irwin It's About Time: America's Imprisonment Binge. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2012.

Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum, eds. The Death Penalty: Debating the Moral, Legal, and Political Issues. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011.

Howard Ball Bush, the Detainees, and the Constitution: The Battle over Presidential Power in the War on Terror. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007.

Gregg Barak, Paul Leighton, and Jeanne Flavin Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.

Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox Trial & Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2010.

Mary Bosworth Explaining U.S. Imprisonment. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2010.

Michael Braswell, Larry Miller, and Joycelyn Pollock Case Studies in Criminal Justice Ethics. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2012.

Dean John Champion, Alida V. Merlo, and Peter J. Benekos The Juvenile Justice System: Delinquency, Processing, and the Law. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2013.

George F. Cole and Christopher E. Smith Criminal Justice in America. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011.

Kevin Davis Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office. New York: Atria, 2007.

Jamie L. Flexon Racial Disparities in Capital Sentencing: Prejudice and Discrimination in the Jury Room. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2012.

Larry K. Gaines and Roger LeRoy Miller Criminal Justice in Action: The Core. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011.

Karen S. Glover Racial Profiling: Research, Racism, and Resistance. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

Jack Goldsmith The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.

David L. Hudson, Jr. Juvenile Justice. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010.

James A. Inciardi Criminal Justice. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2009.

David W. Neubauer and Henry F. Fradella America's Courts and the Criminal Justice System. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012.

Joycelyn M. Pollock Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2012.

Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice. Boston, MA: Pearson, 2013.

Frank Schmalleger Criminal Justice: A Brief Introduction. Boston, MA: Prentice Hall, 2012.

Larry J. Siegel and John L. Worrall Essentials of Criminal Justice. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

William J. Stuntz The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011.

Anthony C. Thompson Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities: Reentry, Race, and Politics. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Gennaro F. Vito and Julie C. Kunselman Juvenile Justice Today. Boston, MA: Prentice Hall, 2012.

Samuel Walker, Cassia Spohn, and Miriam DeLone The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2012.

Periodicals Michelle Alexander "The New Jim Crow," Huffington Post, February 8, 2010. www.huffingtonpost.com.

Radley Balko "The Crime Rate Puzzle," Reason, July 2011.

Atul Gawande "Hellhole," New Yorker, March 30, 2009.

Scott Horton "'In Defense of Flogging': Six Questions for Peter Moskos," Harper's, July 2011.

Peter Katel "Downsizing Prisons," CQ Researcher, March 11, 2011.

Glenn Loury "A Nation of Jailers," Cato Unbound, March 11, 2009. www.cato-unbound.org.

Mikhail Lyubansky "Our Justice System Requires Us to Punish Wrongdoers. What If There Were a Better Way?," Psychology Today, August 18, 2010.

Marc Mauer "Addressing Racial Disparities in Incarceration," Prison Journal, September 12, 2011.

Neal Peirce "America Behind Bars: The Time Is Ripe for Prison Reform," Seattle Times, August 15, 2010.

Amanda Petteruti and Nastassia Walsh "Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies," Justice Policy Institute, April 2008. www.justicepolicy.org.

Liliana Segura "Michelle Alexander on California's 'Cruel and Unusual' Prisons," Nation, May 26, 2011.

Bruce Western "Locked Up, Locked Out: The Social Costs of Incarceration," Reason, July 2011.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2013 Greenhaven Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning.

Source Citation Western, Bruce. "The Benefits of Mass Incarceration Are Outweighed by the Negative

Effects." Criminal Justice, edited by Noël Merino, Greenhaven Press, 2013. Opposing Viewpoints. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, ezproxy.vccs.edu:2048/log in?url=http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EJ3010120278/O VIC?u=viva2_nvcc&xid=e8eca41d. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017. Originally published as "Reentry: Reversing Mass Imprisonment," Boston Review, vol. 33, no. 4, Aug. 2008.

Gale Document Number: GALE|EJ3010120278

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