Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Chapter 6. Demographic Change, the Economy, and the Crack Epidemic

chAPter 6 demographic change, the Economy, and the crack Epidemic As we have emphasized throughout this book, policy choices as well as criminal behavior ultimately determine a nation’s incarceration rate. Specifically, the degree to which a nation decides to use prison as punishment and the intensiveness with which such punishment is employed determine who is sent to prison and for how long. Of course, except in the case of a wrongful conviction, a felony conviction and a prison sentence require a criminal act. The sanctions regime may affect the propensity of those who are not incarcerated to engage in crime through general deterrence and the long-term effects of incarceration on the offending of former inmates (the subject of chapter 7). However, other factors that are determined largely outside of the criminal justice policy domain also have an impact on behavior and ultimately crime and incarceration rates. For instance, there are very strong relationships between the propensity to engage in illegal behavior, on the one hand, and age and gender, on the other. The state of the macroeconomy and the legitimate earnings prospects of the least-educated have an impact on crime rates, and on property crime rates in particular. And finally, innovations in illegal drug markets, such as the introduction of new products, can often affect the degree of violence surrounding the drug trade and may have psychopharmacological effects on users that influence the likelihood that they will engage in crime. Over the past three decades, there have been important changes in these DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE, THE ECONOMY, AND THE CRACK EPIDEMIC 163 external determinants of crime (that is to say, factors determined outside of the criminal justice system) that are likely to have influenced criminal activity and by extension U.S. incarceration rates. Our analysis in chapters 2 and 3 suggests that collectively these factors play a minor role in explaining growth in U.S. incarceration rates. Nonetheless, several factors, in particular the introduction of crack cocaine to the drug market, are often cited as key driving forces. In the present chapter, we discuss the contribution of three potential sources of behavioral change to the growth in U.S. incarceration rates. We begin with a discussion of the nation’s changing sociodemographics. Over the past three decades, the United States has become older, more educated, and considerably more diverse. Nearly all of the observed compositional changes in the adult male population militate toward lower incarceration rates. We present tabulations of U.S. census data for 1980 and 2010 that strongly suggest that, absent any policy changes, our changing demographics in isolation would have led to fairly substantial declines in U.S. incarceration rates. Next, we assess the role of the changing economy. It is indeed the case that legitimate employment prospects have eroded considerably for less-educated workers. Rising wage inequality has combined with absolute declines in real earnings at the bottom of the wage distribution to increase the likelihood of outright joblessness among the less-educated, especially among less-educated minority men. To assess the contribution of these changes to crime and incarceration growth, we draw on the empirical research literature on the relationship between earnings prospects and criminal activity to simulate what the U.S. incarceration rate for various groups would have been had the earnings distribution not changed as it did during the later decades of the twentieth century. Our conclusion is that declining employment prospects may explain a sizable, yet minority, share of incarceration growth for white males, but very little of the increases observed for black males. That being said, the alarming decrease in employment among less-educated minority men suggests that greater involvement in the criminal justice system may be reducing labor force participation. We discuss the possible avenues through which this may be occurring. Finally, we discuss shocks to drug markets in the United States, in particular the introduction of crack cocaine. The crack epidemic is widely credited with causing a rash of violent crime, mostly driven by intergroup violence related to turf conflicts. We document the impact of crack cocaine on black male homicide rates and use these data to measure the arrival date of crack 164 WHY ARE SO MANY AMERICANS IN PRISON? across U.S. states. Our analysis establishes several stylized facts. First, incarceration growth nationwide preceding the introduction of crack had already increased the nation’s incarceration rate considerably. Second, although incarceration growth did accelerate...