Punishment and Inequality in America

Preface

This book reports the main findings of an eight-year project investigating the scope and consequences of growth in the American penal population. Although a vast research literature had studied the evolution of penal institutions and their effects on crime, my research has tried to understand how prisons and jails in America have come to form part of a novel system of social inequality. Instead of seeing prisons chiefly as instruments for crime control , I examined how the penal system, for a generation of young men, came to reschedule the life course, influence economic opportunity, and shape family life. On the broader canvas of American society, this is a story as much about race and poverty as it is about crime and deviance. The project was hatched, almost by accident, in conversations with my friend from graduate school, Katherine Beckett. Beckett was finishing work on her book Making Crime Pay (1997), a study of the politics of criminal justice in America. At that time, in the summer of 1995, the U.S. economy was on the brink of an historic expansion that would serve notice to the welfare capitalisms of western Europe. Unprecedented U.S. job growth, it seemed, could greatly help the disadvantaged if only government could avoid the European error of coddling the poor with welfare. Although the U.S. job machine of the 1990s brought prosperity to many, it appeared that the worst off had benefited the least. And, despite the end of welfare as we knew it, government had not withdrawn from the lives of America’s poor: its role had simply changed. More punitive than limited, government had reached deeply into poor urban communities by sending record numbers of young men to prison and jail at a time when crime rates were at their lowest levels in thirty PREFACE years. Beckett and I tried to make sense of these developments in a paper that viewed the penal system as a labor market institution—a systematic state in- fluence on wages and employment.1 That paper contained two ideas that are developed in greater detail in this book. First, large-scale imprisonment by the end of the 1990s concealed significant poverty and inequality from official statistics by locking up so many young men with little schooling. Second , the penal system deepened inequality by further diminishing the life chances of the disadvantaged. The impact of the penal system on the labor market depended not just on the scale of incarceration, but also on the racial and economic cast of the prison population. Racial disparities had been studied extensively, but I could find little work on the economic situation of prison and jail inmates. I set out with Becky Pettit, then a graduate student at Princeton, to simply document incarceration rates for black and white men at different levels of education. The calculations were simple, but the results were startling. Among black male high school dropouts aged twenty to thirty-five, we estimated that 36 percent were in prison or jail in 1996. The U.S. Census Bureau ’s labor force survey, the Current Population Survey, estimated that 46 percent of young black male dropouts were employed, but this number dropped to 29 percent once prison and jail inmates were counted in the population .2 We followed this up by estimating the chances a man would serve time in prison by his mid-thirties. By now we had learned to expect that young black dropouts were deeply involved in the penal system, but again the results were striking. Among black male dropouts born in the late 1960s, 60 percent had prison records by their early thirties. We also found that black men in their early thirties at the end of the 1990s were more likely to have been to prison than to have graduated from college with a four-year degree.3 What started as an effort to simply describe the extent of incarceration in different parts of the population had begun to reveal a picture of American race and poverty fundamentally transformed by the penal system. This book traces that story from conservative reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, through the historic drop in violence and other serious crime at the end of the 1990s. My research would not have been possible without my superb collaborators . I am indebted to Katherine Beckett for helping me cross the bridge from my home base in comparative sociology to study American politics and society. I...