Street roots
Jan. 20, 2012
BARRED, from page 8
large numbers. The system has been growing
continuously since the mid-1970s, and just
over the last 10 years, really, criminal-justice-
system involvement has become pervasive in
these communities, particularly for those
with a high school education or less.
T.H.: How does mass incarceration mask the
real levels o f unemployment?
B.W.: This is an interesting characteristic
of the system. From the point of view of the
statistical agencies, people that are
institutionalized have no economic status at
all. So, just as they are segregated from the
rest of society, they are also segregated from
our assessment of the economic health of the
society. So you’ve got these huge numbers of
idle men housed in prisons and jails that are
left out of our usual accounts of things like
the unemployment rate or the broader
measures of joblessness that include people
that have dropped out of the labor force
altogether.
This uncounted unemployment in prisons
and jails has been important because through
the 1990s, the economy was doing very, very
well. And it appeared that wages and
employment were improving for very
disadvantaged groups, particularly for young
African-American men who hadn’t been to
college. It was thought that a strong economy
could succeed where social policy had failed,
and all you needed was a really strong
economy and these guys who had been very
difficult to employ were finally getting work.
But once you count the growth of the prison
and jail system through the 1990s, you can
see that joblessness actually increased for
those young African-American men who
haven’t been to college. Their wages were not
increasing either, so, the appearance of
economic improvement for them was
completely an artifact of this hidden
unemployment created by growth in
America’s prisons and jails.
T.H.: What did those statistics look like:
official unemployment versus real
unemployment among young African-American
males?
B.W.: So, if you looked at the whole
population of black men under age 35 who
have dropped out of high school, 40 percent
had jobs in 2008. If you count the prison and
jail population, the true number is only 25
percent — only one in four had jobs — and that
entire gap between the official statistic of 40
(percent), and the correct statistic of 25
(percent), is due to imprisonment. And in
fact, by 2008 those young black dropouts
were more likely to be imprisoned or jailed
than in paid employment.
T.H.: So this might be a tough question to
answer, but: Where’s the outrage? Why haven’t
we seen more o f a civil rights movement form ing
around these issues? '
B.W.: I think, unlike the old civil rights
movement, criminal justice involvement is
deeply stigmatizing. The conventional
understanding is that you only get into prison
if you are committing crime. So I think for a
lot of people, all of those people that wind up
in prison have forfeited their right to be the
beneficiaries of moral outrage.
The truth is, these very high rates of
incarceration have a little bit to do with
crime, but a lot to do with how the American
economy has developed and how American
politics have developed, and I think the task
of generating moral outrage depends upon
building understanding about how changes in
the economy and the political system have
contributed to the problem.
T.H.: There are a few, perhaps, hopeful signs
fo r reduction in the prison population, and I ’m
wondering what your thoughts are. For example,
California recently needed to release a number
o f prisoners because o f budgetary constraints.
Do you think that there’s a budgetary tipping
point at which mass incarceration is ju st simply
no longer feasible?
B.W.: Yeah. People are talking a lot about
this now, and certainly the cost of the system,
particularly in the current climate of
recession, is making policymakers look for
the first time at cheaper alternatives to
incarceration. I think that’s one important
piece of a meaningful reform process, and it’s
been the first major sign of change in
decades. So, while that’s encouraging, there
are two more pieces that are needed for
meaningful reform to happen. One is: we
need to have a broader discussion than simply
criminal justice reform. If the discussion
we’re having is only about how to do
correction more cheaply, we could easily wind
up with a range of bad outcomes. One of
those, for example, would be widespread
privatization, which would be cheaper, and
the conditions of confinement would probably
be harsher as a result.
T.H.: What about the retroactive change in
crack cocaine sentencing guidelines. How much
o f an impact is that going to have? (In 2010,
President Obama signed a law retroactively
reducing mandatory sentencing fo r crack
cocaine possession to make it more on par with
that o f powder cocaine.)
B.W.: I think that’s a different kind of a
change because that’s a recognition that the
system was too punitive in a way that
disproportionately disadvantaged African
Americans over others. That change has been
a long time coming, but it’s very important.
The number of people affected is not vast —
because it’s in the federal system, and the
federal system is only 10 percent of the whole
prison system — but the political significance
of it is very substantial. And that’s kind of
where I was getting to with the other thing
that needs to change in order for there to be
more meaningful reform.
Ultimately, the political conversation has to
be broader than simply about crime and
public safety, and be large enough to
accommodate issues of racial and social
justice. The policy has to address the really
deep employment problems people were
having in poor, inner-city communities, and all
of the social problems that flow from high
rates of unemployment.
T.H.: In terms o f movement building, then,
do we lead with this vision o f rebuilding and
creating jobs and equality in our communities,
and get at incarceration through that?
B.W.: The way I think about it is that it’s
time to find a middle ground between those
who are really motivated by social justice and
those who are really motivated by the
problems of crime and public safety, and we
need to redefine what public safety means. In
the era of mass incarceration, public safety
has a very thin definition in which people
were unsafe because they faced the risk of
violence from strangers. That was sort of the
phantom that mass incarceration was trying
to control. But in real life, people face a whole
array of risks and a whole array of
uncertainties and unpredictabilities in their
daily life, not just the risk of criminal
victimization. There are risks of
unemployment, there are risks of poor health
when you’re uninsured or underinsured, risks
of your family breaking up. And so what we
need is a much thicker conception of public
safety to motivate a public policy that tries to
bring order and stability and regularity into
people’s lives. This would really allow us to
imagine a future for ourselves, make plans for
our children and invest as best we can in our
communities.
T.H.: It seems, with the imposition o f
domestic austerity that the debt-ceiling deal
represents, that we are headed in exactly the
opposite direction. I ’m sure that yo u ’ve been
thinking a bit about the recent deal that was
carved out in Washington and what that means
fo r the issues you care about.
B.W.: Things have gotten markedly worse
in the political climate very quickly, and there
is no appetite among policy makers for
spending. For those of us interested in policy
reform, the current moment creates really
special and significant challenges, and we
have to try and think innovatively about
where we go from here, and how can we build
this thick public safety net without big public
expenditures. It probably will involve things
like partnerships with nonprofits, which are
also under stress, and an increased role for
community
organizations, civic
associations and
things like that. It’s a
profoundly challenging
time right now.
The other thing I’d
say is, you know, when
you look historically at
when large-scale policy
reform programs were
undertaken,
grassroots
organization has been
enormously important.
I think that’s the other
avenue that we have to
look down in order to
be able to conceive of
the progressive
futures of policy
reform.
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is especially critical.
T .H .:
B.W.: I agree with that. You know, in some
ways I think maybe this is the unfinished
business of the civil rights movement. The
protections for the economically
disadvantaged — I’m trying to figure out the
best way to say this — were only ever a
second priority for the civil rights movement,
which was very much focused on the
institutions of Jim Crow and explicit racial
discrimination. This had some redistributive
effect for the economically disadvantaged, but
the whole policy thrust was not focused on
the poor specifically. The poor of black and
white alike. I think that’s the current
challenge for grassroots organization.
T.H.: It seems like the success o f the civil
rights movement was in building a strong black
middle class, and even that is threatened at this
point.
B.W.: It is. I mean, this is where we’re at
now. The kinds of social problems and
disadvantage that we used to discuss in the
context of poverty — the bottom 10 or 15
percent — now really describes the situation
of the bottom third of American society. And
so the economic challenges the more solidly
middle- and working-class households are
facing are really significant. The economic
gains of the black middle class that were
produced by the civil rights movement are at
risk of being lost. That’s less a story about
mass incarceration than it is about rising
economic inequality and insecurity in the
United States.
Reprinted from R eal Change News,
Seattle, Wash. Street R oots’ sister paper
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