Street roots., January 20, 2012, Page 8, Image 8

8
street roots
Jan. 20, 2012
$
I
BY JOSH M A C P H E E
V X
Barred for life
How social inequality and prison population growth are two sides o f the same set o f cuffs
B Y TIM O TH Y H A RRIS
f
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
f
H
f
t
?
f
f
t
!
?
t
!
f
f
f
arvard professor Bruce Western says
our criminal justice system hurts us
more than we realize.
Bruce Western is professor of sociology
and director of the Multidisciplinary
Program in Inequality and Social Policy at
the Harvard Kennedy School of
Government. His recent work has focused
on the link between social inequality and the
growth of the prison and jail population in
the United States. Western finds that the
penal system has become a common
presence in the lives of poor Americans,
with lasting effects on their life chances.
In “Punishment and Inequality in
America” (Russell Sage Foundation, $17.95),
Western asks what role incarceration plays
in the increasing economic and racial
inequality in America. He finds that rising
rates of imprisonment among young black
men without a college education have
caused a rift in African-American society,
and that those with less education are
increasingly separated from those with a
higher education. The book also chronicles
the social and economic effects of mass
incarceration: the connection between
serving prison time and reduction in
earnings; the skewed statistics on wages
and employment; and the destabilization of
families.
Bruce Western
T im o th y H a r r is : What do we mean when
we use the term mass incarceration?
:
Mass incarceration
describes the penal system as it has
B r u c e W e s te r n :
emerged in the United States in the last
decade or so. It’s really capturing two ideas.
One is: We’ve got a highly unequal system of
incarceration where the influence of prisons
and jails is felt overwhelmingly in poor
communities. And the second part of the
story is the very, very high rate of
incarceration. So this has produced really
astronomical rates of criminal justice
involvement among, in particular, poor
young men and poor young men of color.
These men now have a life experience
trajectory through adulthood that’s really
wholly different from anyone else in
American society, and they’re largely cut off
from all of the opportunities of American
society because of the way the penal system
has grown.
T .H .: The Pew Center Report cites one in
99 Am ericans are behind bars, or one in 36
are affected i f you include those on probation.
Are those statistics still current?
Yeah, they’re roughly accurate. The
system has grown a little bit in the few
years since the Pew report (came out in
Feb. 2008). I tend to think, as large as those
numbers are, they understate the
magnitude of the problem because the truth
is not everyone is equally at risk of going to
prison. If we were to focus on young
African-American men who have dropped
out of high school, the number is not really
one in 100, but one in three. If we were to
think about the lifetime likelihood of going
to prison for those African-American men,
the chances they’ll go to prison at some
point in their lives is now about two-thirds,
B .W .:
or 66 percent.
T .H .: C an you describe the downward spiral
that economically disadvantaged communities
fin d themselves in ?
This all started really in the 1960s,
with the origins of deindustrialization in
American cities. Historically, men without
much schooling from poor and working-class
families could find jobs that paid decent
wages in urban industry. Then, starting in
the mid-1960s, urban manufacturing
industry began to move out of the inner
cities, and this created huge employment
problems for poor, urban communities.
Urban living conditions became worse,
particularly through the 1970s, and people
moved out, so large pockets of poor people
with really poor economic opportunities
were left behind. And then, into this setting,
came the criminal justice system, which
became more punitive through the late
1970s, and by the 1990s, the drug war
began to ramp up. Drug enforcement by the
police escalated and focused on poor
neighborhoods in big cities and mid-sized
cities.
The criminal justice system became
tougher in other ways as well. Community
corrections became less rehabilitative and
more punitive, and very long sentences
were introduced for people who were
convicted for violent offenses. So, you had
these large numbers of poor young men
who had high rates of unemployment,
largely through the process of
deindustrialization, and these men were
swept into the criminal justice system in
B .W .:
See BARRED, page 9