Race, Prison, and
Poverty
The Race To Incarcerate
In The Age Of Correctional Keynesianism
In the last two-and-a-half decades, the prison
population has undergone what the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics
director Jan Chaiken last year called "literally incredible"
expansion. Chaiken reported a quadrupling of the U.S. incarceration rate since
1975. That rate, more than 600 prisoners for every 100,000 people, is by far
the highest in the industrialized world. The U.S. incarcerates its citizens at
a rate six times higher than Canada, England, and France, seven times higher
than Switzerland and Holland, and ten times Sweden and Finland. Beyond sheer
magnitude, a second aspect of America's incarceration boom is its heavily
racialized nature. On any given day, Chaiken reported, 30 percent of
African-American males ages 20 to 29 are "under correctional
supervision" ‹either in jail or prison or on probation or parole.
Especially chilling is a statistical model used by the Bureau of Justice
Statistics to determine the lifetime chances of incarceration for individuals
in different racial and ethnic groups. Based on current rates, it predicts that
a young Black man age 16 in 1996 faces a 29 percent chance of spending time in
prison during his life. The corresponding statistic for white men in the same
age group is 4 percent. According to Thomas K. Lowenstein, director of the
Electronic Policy Network, 7 percent of Black children- nearly 9 times more
than white children- have an incarcerated parent.
In Illinois, the prison population has grown by
more than 60 percent since 1990. That growth has been fueled especially by
Black admissions, including a rising number of nonviolent drug offenders. Two
thirds of the state's more than 44,000 prisoners are African-American.
According to the Chicago Reporter, a monthly magazine that covers race
and poverty issues, 1 in 5 Black Cook County (which contains Chicago and some
of its suburbs) men in their 20s are either in prison or jail or on parole. For
Cook County whites of the same gender and age, the corresponding ratio is 1 in
104. Illinois has 115,746 more persons enrolled in its 4-year public
universities than in its prisons. When it comes to Blacks, however, it has
10,000 more prisoners. For every African-American enrolled in those
universities, two and a-half Blacks are in prison or on parole in Illinois. Similar
racially specific reversals of meaning can be found in other states with
significant Black populations. In New York, the Justice Policy Institute
reports that more Blacks entered prison just for drug offense than graduated
from the state's massive university system with undergraduate, masters, and
doctoral degrees combined in the 1990s.
In some inner-city neighborhoods, a preponderant
majority of Black males now possess criminal records. According to
Congressperson Danny Davis, fully 70 percent of men between ages 18 and 45 in
the impoverished North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's West Side are
ex-offenders. Chris Moore, director of the Chicago Urban League's Male
Involvement Program, which provides support services to 16- to 35-year-old
fathers in 2 high poverty South Side neighborhoods, reports that the same
percentage of his clients are saddled with criminal records. Job placement
counselors at the League's Employment, Training, and Counseling Department
estimate that half of their 3,742 predominantly Black clients last year listed
felony records as a leading barrier to employment. Criminologists Dina Rose and
Todd Clear found Black neighborhoods in Tallahassee where every resident could
identify at least one friend or relative who has been incarcerated. In
predominantly Black urban communities across the country, incarceration is so
widespread and commonplace that it has become what Chaiken calls "almost a
normative life experience."
A Many-Sided Disenfranchisement
Researchers and advocates tracking the impact of
mass incarceration find a number of devastating consequences in high-poverty
Black communities. The most well known form of this so-called "collateral
damage in the war on drugs" is the widespread political disenfranchisement
of felons and ex-felons. Ten states deny voting rights for life to ex-felons.
According to the Sentencing Project, 46 states prohibit inmates from voting
while serving a felony sentence, 32 states deny the vote to felons on parole,
and 29 states disenfranchise felony probationers. Thanks to these rules, 13
percent of all Black men in the U.S. have lost their electoral rights- "a
bitter aftermath," notes British sociologist David Ladipo, "to the
expansion of voting rights secured, at such cost, by the freedom marches of the
fifties and sixties." But the economic effects are equally significant.
When prison and felony records are thrown into that mixture, the labor market
consequences are often disastrous. Thus, it is not uncommon to hear academic
researchers and service providers cite unemployment rates as high as 50 percent
for people with records. One study, based in California during the early 1990s,
found that just 21 percent of that state's parolees were working full time. In
a detailed study, Karen Needels found that less than 40 percent of 1,176 men
released from Georgia's prison system in 1976 had any officially recorded
earnings in each year from 1983 to 1991. For those with earnings, average
annual wages were exceedingly low and differed significantly by race: white
former inmates averaged $7,880 per year and Blacks made just $4,762. In the
most widely cited study in the growing literature on the labor market
consequences of racially disparate criminal justice policies, Harvard economist
Richard Freeman used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
(NLSY). Limiting his sample to out-of-school men and controlling for numerous
variables (drug usage, education, region, and age) that might bias upward the
link between criminal records and weak labor market attachment, Freeman found
that those who had been in jail or on probation in 1980 had a 19 percent higher
chance of being unemployed in 1988 than those with no involvement in the
criminal justice system. He also found that prison records reduced the amount of
time employed after release by 25 to 30 percent.
More recently, Princeton sociologist Bruce
Western has mined NLSY data to show that incarceration has "large and
enduring effects on job-prospects of ex-convicts." He finds that the
negative labor market effects of youth incarceration can last for more than a
decade and that adult incarceration reduces paid employment by five to ten
weeks annually. Since incarceration rates are especially high among those with
the least power in the labor market (young and unskilled minority men), he
shows, U.S. incarceration dramatically exacerbates inequality. This research is
consistent with numerous experimental studies suggesting that the employment
prospects of job applicants with criminal records are far worse than the
chances of persons who have never been convicted or imprisoned and from the
testimony of job placement professionals who deal with ex-offenders. "Even
when paroled inmates are able to find jobs," the New York Times
reported last Fall, "they earn only half as much as people of the same
social and economic background who have not been incarcerated." The
obstacles to ex-offender employment include the simple refusal of many
employers to even consider hiring an "ex-con." Employers routinely
check for criminal backgrounds in numerous sectors, including banking,
security, financial services, law, education, and health care. But for many
jobs, employer attitudes are irrelevant: state codes places steep barriers to
the hiring of ex-offenders in numerous government and other occupations. At the
same time, ex-offenders are further disadvantaged in the labor market by the
nature of daily prison experience. "The increasingly violent and
overcrowded state of prisons and jails," notes Western, "is likely to
produce certain attitudes, mannerisms, and behavioral practices that 'on the
inside' function to enhance survival but are not compatible with success in the
conventional job market." The alternately aggressive and sullen posture
that prevails behind bars is deadly in a job market where entry-level
occupations increasingly demand "soft" skills related to selling and
customer service. In this as in countless other ways, the inmate may be
removed, at least temporarily, from prison but prison lives on within the
ex-offender, limiting his "freedom" on the "outside." The
barriers to employment created by mass incarceration for African-Americans are
not limited to those with records. As sociologist Elijah Anderson has noted,
the "astonishing" number and percentage of Black men who are under
the supervision of the criminal justice system "must be considered partly
responsible for the widespread perception of young Black men as dangerous and
not to be trusted."
Ex-offenders' chances for successful
"reintegration" are worsened by the de-legitimization of
rehabilitation that has accompanied the rise of the American mass incarceration
state. Under the now dominant penal paradigm of literal
"incapacitation," the number of inmates enrolled in drug treatment,
job-training, or educational programs has been in steep decline since the
1980s. According to the Institute on Crime, Justice, and Corrections, just 9
percent of prisoners are currently engaged in full-time job-training or
education activities. Numerous states, including New York, have eliminated
inmates' right to take college extension courses and Congress has repealed
prisoners' right to receive Pell grants to pay for college tuition.
Savage Ironies and Sinister Synergies
The situation arising from mass Black
incarceration is fraught with savage, self-fulfilling policy ironies and
sinister sociological synergies. Criminal justice policies are pushing hundreds
of thousands of already disadvantaged and impoverished "underclass"
Blacks further from minimally remunerative engagement with the labor market.
According to Lowenstein, 80 percent of America's
prison inmates are parents. Researchers estimate that children of prisoners are
five times more likely to experience incarceration than those who never
experience the pain of having one of their parents imprisoned. Meanwhile,
incarceration deepens a job-skill deficit that a significant body of research
shows to be a leading factor explaining "criminal" behavior among
disadvantaged people in the first place. "Crime rates are inversely related,"
Richard B. Freeman and Jeffrey Fagan have shown, "to expected legal wages,
particularly among young males with limited job skills or prospects." The
"war on drugs" that contributes so strongly to minority incarceration
inflates the price of underground substances, combining with ex-offenders'
shortage of marketable skills in the legal economy to create irresistible
incentives for parolees to engage in precisely the sort of income-generating
conduct that leads back to prison.
In Illinois today, 36 percent of ex-offenders
and a staggering 48 percent of Black ex-offenders return to prison within three
years. These numbers bother Danny Davis, whose Seventh District on Chicago's
West Side contains five ex-prisoner transition centers. As men and women in his
district "transition from incarceration to freedom," Davis recently
told the Illinois Senate Judiciary Committee, "What they need most are
jobs. What they find instead," Davis has learned, "are cold stares,
unreturned phone calls, and closed doors. The jobs are far and few between, and
in most cases non-existent" even for "serious and earnest men and
women, working to clean up their act, and transition into productive
citizens."
Denied what Davis calls "a second chance to
become productive citizens," even rehabilitation- minded ex-offenders
often find themselves re-enmeshed in illicit but income-generating activities
that land them back in downstate lockups. The lost potential earnings, savings,
consumer demand, and human and social capital that result from mass
incarceration cost Black communities untold millions of dollars in potential
economic development, worsening an inner-city political economy already
crippled by decades of capital flight and de-industrialization. The dazed,
battered, and embittered products of the prison-industrial complex are released
back into a relatively small number of predominantly Black and high-poverty
zip-codes and census tracts, deepening the savage concentration of poverty,
crime, and despair that is the hallmark of modern American
"hyper-segregation" by race and class.
The growth in spending on prisons is directly
related to a decline in the growth of positive social spending in such poverty-
and crime-reducing areas as education, child-care, and job training.
Sociologists John Hagan and Ronit Dinovitzer find that public investment in
incarceration is now "so extensive that several large states now spend as
much or more money to incarcerate young adults than to educate their
college-age citizens." From the 1980s through the 1990s, they report,
correctional spending has risen at a faster rate than any other type of state
expenditure category, creating significant opportunity costs that contribute to
a vicious, self-fulfilling circle of negative public investment.
The New Racism
Meanwhile, prisoners' deletion from official
U.S. unemployment statistics contributes to excessively rosy perceptions of
American socioeconomic performance that worsen the political climate for
minorities. Bruce Western has shown that factoring incarceration into
unemployment rates challenges the conventional American notion that the United
States' "unregulated" labor markets have been out-performing Europe's
supposedly hyper-regulated employment system. Far from taking a laissez-faire
approach, "the U.S. state has made a large and coercive intervention into
the labor market through the expansion of the legal system." An American
unemployment rate adjusted for imprisonment would rise by two points, giving
the U.S. a jobless ratio much closer to that of European nations, where
including inmates jobless count raises the joblessness rate by a few tenths of
a percentage point. Including incarceration would especially boost the official
Black male unemployment rate, which Western estimates, counting prison, at nearly
39 percent during the mid-1990s. If you factor in incarceration, Western and
his colleague Becky Petit find, there was "no enduring recovery in the
employment of young Black high-school drop-outs" during the long Clinton
boom.
By artificially reducing both aggregate and
racially specific unemployment rates, mass incarceration makes it easier for
the majority culture to continue to ignore the urban ghettoes that live on
beneath official rhetoric about "opportunity" being generated by
"free markets." It facilitates the elimination of honest discussion
of America's deep and inseparably linked inequalities of race and class from
the nation's public discourse. It encourages and enables a "new,"
subtler racism in an age when open, public displays of bigotry have been
discredited. Relying heavily on longstanding American opportunity myths and
standard class ideology, this new racism blames inner-city minorities for their
own "failure" to match white performance in a supposedly now free,
meritorious, and color-blind society. Whites who believe, thanks partly to the
decline of explicit public racism, that racial barriers have been lifted in the
United States think that people of color who do not "succeed" fall
short because of choices they made and/or because of inherent cultural or even
biological limitations. "As white America sees it," write Leonard
Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs Brown in their disturbing By The Color of Our
Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race (2000),
"every effort has been made to welcome Blacks into the American
mainstream, and now they're on their own... 'We got the message; we made the
corrections- get on with it.'"
Correctional Keynesianism
The ultimate policy
irony at the heart of America's passion for prisons is summarized in the phrase
correctional Kenynesianism. The prison construction boom, fed by the rising
"market" of Black offenders, is an often remarkable job and tax-base
creator and local economic multiplier for predominantly white "down"
or "up" state communities that are generally removed from urban
minority concentrations. Those communities, themselves often recently
hollowed-out by the De-industrializing and family farm-destroying gales of the
"free market" system, have become part of a prison-industrial lobby
that presses for harsher sentences and tougher laws, seeking to protect and
expand their economic base even as crime rates continue to fall. With good
reason: prison-building boom serves as what Ladipo calls "a latter-day
Keynesian infrastructural investment program for [often] blight-struck
communities... Indeed, it has been phenomenally successful in terms of creating
relatively secure, decent paid, and often unionized jobs." According to
Todd Clear, the negative labor market effects of mass incarceration on black
communities are probably minor "compared to the economic relocation of
resources" from Black to white communities that mass incarceration
entails. As Clear explains in cool and candid terms: "Each prisoner
represents an economic asset that has been removed from that community and
placed elsewhere. As an economic being, the person would spend money at or near
his or her area of residence- typically, an inner city. Imprisonment displaces
that economic activity: Instead of buying snacks in a local deli, the prisoner
makes those purchases in a prison commissary. The removal may represent a loss
of economic value to the home community, but it is a boon to the prison
community. Each prisoner represents as much as $25,000 in income for the
community in which the prison is located, not to mention the value of
constructing the prison facility in the first place. This can be a massive
transfer of value: A young male worth a few thousand dollars of support to
children and local purchases is transformed into a $25,000 financial asset to a
rural prison community. The economy of the rural community is artificially
amplified, the local city economy artificially deflated."
Consistent with this a recent Chicago Tribune
story bears the perverse title "Towns Put Dreams in Prisons." In
downstate Hoopeston, Illinois, the Tribune reports, there is "talk
of the mothballed canneries that once made this a boom town and whether any of
that bustling spirit might return if the Illinois Department of Corrections
comes to town." "You don't like to think about incarceration,"
Hoopeston's Mayor told the Tribune, "but this is an opportunity for
Hoopeston. We've been plagued by plant closings." Ault's willingness to
enter the prison sweepstakes was validated by another small town mayor, Andy
Hutchens of Ina, Illinois. According to the Tribune, in a passage that
reminds us to include diversion of tax revenue among the ways that mass
incarceration steals wealth from the inner city: "Before [Ina's] prison
was built, the city took in just $17,000 a year in motor fuel tax revenue. Now
the figure is more like $72,000. Last year's municipal budget appropriation was
$380,000. More than half of that money is prison revenue. Streets that were
paved in chipped gravel and oil for generations soon will all be covered in
asphalt. An $850,000 community center that doubles as a gym and computer lab
for the school across the street is being paid for with prison money,"
Hutchens said.
"It really figures out this way. This
little town of 450 people is getting the tax money of a town of 2,700,"
Hutchens said, and then added with a grin, "And those people in that
prison can't vote me out of office."
Mass Incarceration
According
to "get-tough on crime" politicians and policy-makers, "prison
works": it reduces crime rates. But that intuitively seductive argument,
which cites the declining federal crime index of the 1990s as its primary
evidence, cannot explain why crime rates increased in the 1970s and the late
1980s while prison rates grew at the same rate as they did in the 1990s. It
ignores the fact that drug convictions do not figure into the federal index‹a
crucial omission since incarceration rates are strongly fed by the "war on
drugs." It ignores the strong possibility that other factors, including
the record-length economic expansion of the 1990s, provide better explanations
than mass incarceration for declining official crime. It is embarrassed, finally, by comparative
international data. U.S. citizens are just as likely to be victimized by crime
as citizens in European countries who jail and imprison relatively tiny
percentages of their population because they view prisons as fundamentally
criminogenic‹as breeders of crime. Americans are far more likely than their
low-incarceration European counterparts to be victimized by rape, murder,
robbery, and violent assault in general.
Clear has discovered three "crime-enhancing
effects of prison" on impoverished urban communities. First, the rampant
arrest and incarceration of inner-city youth for drug crimes creates an ironic
"replacement effect" that "cancels out the crime-prevention
benefits of incapacitation." In the face of a stable demand for illegal
substances, mass arrest and incarceration "creates job openings in the
drug delivery enterprise and allows for an ever-broadening recruitment of
citizens into the illegal trade." Modern criminal justice practice is
often blind to this phenomenon, Clear argued, because its "atomistic"
understanding of criminal behavior as purely individual behavior obscures the
group basis of much illegal inner-city activity. Second, mass incarceration
deepens the presence of negative "social factors" that contribute to
"criminality" in minority communities: broken families, inequality,
poverty, alienation, and social disorder. Third, mass incarceration
ironically undercuts the deterrent power of prison.
"As more people acquire a grounded
knowledge of prison life," Clear learned, "the power of prison to
deter crime through fear is diminished." Thus, Newsweek reporter
Ellis Cose noted last year that prison has "become so routine" in
some neighborhoods "that going in can be an opportunity for reconnecting
with friends." A drug-dealer from Maryland told Cose of his "panic on
conviction. Having heard horror stories about young men abused inside, he
fretted about how he would fend off attacks. Once behind bars, he discovered
that the population consisted largely of buddies from the hood. Instead of
something to fear, prison 'was like a big camp.'"
Clear and fellow criminologist Dina Rose think
that certain U.S. communities have reached what they see as a curious criminal
justice "tipping point"- the locus at which repressive state policies
actually drive up crime rates. When 1 percent or more of a neighborhood's
residents are imprisoned per year, they theorize, mass incarceration
incapacitates neighborhood social networks to the point where they can no
longer keep crime under control. But, of course, the communities
"tipped" by criminal justice policies are located in a relatively
small number of minority-based inner-city zip codes. The record 600,000
offenders released from prison last year "return," notes the New
York Times, "largely to poor neighborhoods of large cities."
Part of the Tangle
It is no simple matter to determine the precise
extent to which mass incarceration is exacerbating the deep socio-economic and
related cultural and political traumas that already plague inner-city
communities and help explain disproportionate Black "criminality,"
arrest, and incarceration in the first place. Still, it is undeniable that the
race to incarcerate is having a profoundly negative effect on Black
communities. Equally undeniable is the fact that Black incarceration rates
reflect deep racial bias in the criminal justice system and the broader
society. Do the cheerleaders of "get tough" crime and sentencing
policy really believe that African-Americans deserve to suffer so
disproportionately at the hands of the criminal justice system? There is a vast
literature showing that structural, institutional, and cultural racism and
severe segregation by race and class are leading causes of inner-city crime.
Another considerable body of literature shows that Blacks are victims of racial
bias at every level of the criminal justice system‹from stop, frisk, and arrest
to prosecution, sentencing, release, and execution. These disparities give
legitimacy to the movement of ex-offender groups for the expungement of
criminal and prison records for many nonviolent offenses, especially in cases
where ex-convicts have shown an earnest desire to "go straight."
Further and deeper remedies will be required. These include a moratorium on new
prison construction (to stop the insidious, self-replicating expansion of the
prison-industrial complex), the repeal of laws that deny voting rights to
felons and ex-felons, amnesty and release for most inmates convicted of
non-violent crimes, de-criminalization of narcotics, the repeal of the
"war on drugs" at home and abroad, revision of state and federal
sentencing and local "zero tolerance" practices and ordinances,
abolition of racial, ethnic, and class profiling in police practice, and the
outlawing of private, for-profit prisons and other economic activities that
derive investment gain from mass incarceration.
Activists and policy makers should call and make
plans for a criminal- to social-justice "peace dividend": the
large-scale transfer of funds spent on mass arrest, surveillance, and
incarceration into such policy areas as drug treatment, job-training, transitional
services for ex-offenders, and public education regarding the employment
potential of ex-offenders. They should call and make plans for the diversion of
criminal justice resources from "crime in the streets" (i.e., the
harassment and imprisonment of lower- class and inner-city people) to serious
engagement with under-sentenced "crime in the suites." More broadly,
they should seek a general redistribution of resources from privileged and
often fantastically wealthy persons to those most penalized from birth by America's
long and intertwined history of inherited class and race privilege.
America's
expanding prison, probation, and parole populations are recruited especially
from what leading slavery reparations advocate Randall Robinson calls "the
millions of African-Americans bottom-mired in urban hells by the savage
time-release social debilitations of American slavery." The ultimate
solutions lay, perhaps, beyond the parameters of the existing politic-economic
order. "Capitalism," Eugene Debs argued in 1920, "needs and must
have the prison to protect itself from the [lower-class] criminals it has
created." But the examples of
Western Europe and Canada, where policy makers prefer prevention and
rehabilitation through more social-democratic approaches, show that mass
incarceration is hardly an inevitable product of capitalism per se. Nothing can
excuse policymakers and activists from the responsibility to end racist
criminal justice practices that are significantly exacerbating the difficulties
faced by the nation's most truly and intractably disadvantaged. More then
merely a symptom of the tangled mess of problems that create, sustain, and
deepen America's savage patterns of class and race inequality, mass
incarceration has become a central part of the mess. For these and other
reasons, it will be an especially worthy target for creative, democratic
protest and policy formation in the new millennium.
Originally published at Z Magazine
Paul Street is research director at the Chicago Urban League. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in In These Times, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, Dissent, Journal of Social History, Mid-America, and the Journal of American Ethnic History.
Originally published at Z Magazine
Paul Street is research director at the Chicago Urban League. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in In These Times, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, Dissent, Journal of Social History, Mid-America, and the Journal of American Ethnic History.
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The degree of
civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
—Doestoevski
|
Jose
Luis Morin is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City
University of New York. He specializes in criminal justice, civil rights, human
rights and race and ethnicity issues.
One in four federal
prison inmates is a Latino. Latinos are incarcerated in state and federal
prisons 2.6 times greater than whites in the United States. According to the
Bureau of Justice statistics, Latinos are the fastest growing minority group in
the prison system.
In
10 states, Latino men are incarcerated at rates between five and nine times
greater than whites. In four states, Latino youth under the age of 18 are
incarcerated at adult facilities at rates between 7 and 17 times greater than
those of white youths. Latinos and African Americans are disproportionately
represented in federal and state prisons and receive harsher sentences.
As
a result, Latino children are more than three times more likely to have a
parent in prison than whites. Those stark statistics, presented by Jose Luis
Morin, a professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at the
John Jay College, might lead one to believe that Latinos are inclined to crime.
But, the facts, Morin said, show just the opposite.
"Latinos
are actually less likely to be involved in violent crime than any other racial
or ethnic group," Morin said. "The overwhelming majority of
incarcerated Latinos and Latinas are convicted for relatively minor non-violent
offenses and/or are first time offenders." When it comes to Latinos and
crime, Morin said, myths and contradictions abound, the product of a history of
discrimination and the failure of the media to correct and clarify the record.
"The
reality is that when we're talking about crime in the United States, the
typical criminals, unlike what people popularly believe…in the United States
based on arrest records are really white people, not African Americans, not
Latinos." Morin said the war on
drugs "is in fact the single greatest force behind the growth of the
prison population of Latinos in prisons around the United States. This war on
drugs is almost entirely being fought in Latino and African American
communities," despite the fact that drug use in no more prevalent or in
some
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