Big Prisons, Big Dreams: Crime and the Failure of America's Penal System

Chapter 6: Prison Effects: Who Gets Locked Up

146 Chapter 6 Prison Effects Who Gets Locked Up The rate of imprisonment in the United States has increased consistently from 1973 through 2000, growing by 920 percent! During that period, the rate of crime rose 42 percent. Thus, over this thirty-year span, as imprisonment increased each and every year, crime was not suppressed; in fact, it was as high in 1991 as it was two decades earlier.A further examination of the relationship between imprisonment and crime rates is found in the next chapter. For now, it is useful to remember that when imprisonment rises, crime sometimes goes down and sometimes up. In other words, in the long run of history measured from 1973 through 2000, a rising rate of imprisonment does not assure citizens of the United States that they are receiving any greater crime control protection. In response to such a revelation or reading of the data, proponents of the imprisonment binge might propose one of two explanations.The first is that crime would have increased much more than 42 percent if imprisonment had not increased by 920 percent over the past three decades, and several imprisonment proponents have used elaborate statistical models in an effort to prove just such a point (see Clear 1996 for discussion). But we can never know if this statement is true, and this idea can only be accepted on faith. Second, imprisonment proponents will avert our attention away from the long-term association between incarceration and crime to short-term trends, especially those evident in the 1990s.They argue that we must look at periods where the increase in imprisonment had been in effect for some time before we can see bene fits. Ignoring twenty years of data that does not fit with their position, however, this argument seems to miss the broader issues involved. Prison Effects 147 While academics and policy makers will continue to argue about the effectiveness of imprisonment as a crime control strategy, there continues to be a need to examine the impacts of continually raising the rate of incarceration in the United States.We know, for example, there are many more Americans in prison today than in 1973.Thus, in addition to asking how an increased rate of incarceration affects crime, we also need to ask: Who are these Americans who are now locked safely away behind bars? And, how has our imprisonment binge affected the characteristics of the prison population? We examine this issue in the sections that follow. Who Is in America’s Prisons? How has the imprisonment binge affected the characteristics of the population of Americans who are locked up in the prison system? If we follow the logic of deterrence and incapacitation arguments, we would hypothesize that the effort to control crime by locking up more criminals should result in the incarceration of more serious offenders, and that the characteristics of the prison population would change to reflect this emphasis on serious crime. Are the people who have been locked away in America’s prisons the most serious criminals in society? This is a complex question to answer, in part, because it requires acknowledging who is not locked up in prison.As noted earlier, an important criminal element omitted from America’s prison system includes white-collar and corporate criminals. Because this group is omitted from prison, we cannot use them to assess whether our nation’s imprisonment binge changed the characteristics of inmates housed in prison.We could, however, argue that it would be useful to examine whether there were any long term changes in the level of white collar and corporate crime and the rate at which these offenders were incarcerated. Unfortunately, there is no useful, long-term database on white-collar and corporate crime that details the characteristics of these kinds of criminals or the number of crimes they have committed over the time period we wish to study.Thus, we are largely “stuck” with a focus on the changing characteristics of inmates in American prisons. Before we can begin that investigation, we must admit that it is dif- ficult to precisely measure the characteristics of prison inmates over the past thirty years because data on the characteristics of prison inmates is not available for the entire period. Further, because the imprisonment 148 B i g P r i s o n s , B i g D r e am s binge covers such a...