MARCH 2014
F
requently labeled the prison capital of the world, the United States
incarcerates its population at a
rate of 716 per 100,000. According to
the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the
current prison population is 1.57 million, a figure astonishingly close to the
system’s official capacity of 2.26 million. System analyses suggest that the
relationship between mass incarceration
and social inequality is reciprocal and
complex in nature, pervasively reproducing racial and class hierarchies that
institutionally bound millions of American families. Incarceration’s penalizing
consequences accumulate by disproportionately affecting those who already
have the least amount of economic opportunity and the weakest levels of intergenerational social mobility. Consequently, the carceral state has effectively
created a new group of “social outcasts”
that disproportionately consists of African-American males with low levels
of educational attainment. According
to Western and Pettit, this new social
group does not appear in mainstream accounts of poverty and unemployment,
rendering their unequal status invisible.
As the mass incarceration epidemic
steadily grew out of the late 1970s, the
criminal justice system became a visible
component of the American life course.
Life course analysis is concerned with
the structural forces that determine how
an individual’s role in society evolves
and shifts as they reach adulthood. Imprisonment greatly reorders one’s life
course by disrupting normal, healthy
adult transitions that promote success
and stability. This disruption negatively
reshapes life trajectories by reinforcing
the social inequalities that initially led
to deficits in opportunities and subsequent engagement in criminal behavior.
Data from the 1991 Survey of Inmates of
State and Federal Correctional Facilities
suggests that nine percent of U.S. males
will enter prison during their lifetime.
For African-American males, life course
analysis indicates that the frequency
of incarceration rivals traditional life
GUEST
stages such as college completion, military service, or marriage, argue Western
and Pettit. Failure to complete these
life stages as a result of incarceration
is exacerbated by an inmate’s release
because they reenter society with little
future success in terms of educational
opportunities, employment eligibility,
and family reconciliation. While previous imprisonment limits future opportunities, low socioeconomic indicators
increase the initial probability of incarceration. For example, Sampson and
Lauritsen show that during the 1980s,
inequality of opportunity in the form of
failing low-skill labor markets helped
propel scores of low-educated men
into drugs and crime. Thus, expanding
wage and employment inequality at the
lower end of the distribution has been
linked with an exponential increase in
men’s imprisonment, especially among
non-college educated men. Western,
Kleykamp, and Rosenfeld found that if
the wage and employment rates of the
1980s had continued into the late-1990s,
labor market research shows that prison
admission rates for non-college edu-
crime policy, Western and Pettit introduce incarceration and joblessness
as variables affecting the integrity of
black-white wage measurements. They
note that wage inequality and rising incarceration negatively impact the observed gap between black-white wages
and employment rates. Using sample
selection analysis, their work accounts
for high rates of joblessness and incarceration among black men in order
to accurately estimate the black-white
wage gap. They contend that contemporary analyses of wage inequality over
emphasize the economic gains of black
men because the abundance of joblessness amongst low-skilled men skews
assessments of wage and racial inequality. By using sample selection, Western
and Pettit find that among working-age
men in 1999, labor inactivity and incarceration led to a seven to twenty percent increase in the black-white wage
gap. This finding refutes previous research that showed improvement in the
economic status of young black men.
Research by Sampson & Laub and
Western & Beckkett examining post-
The carceral state has effectively created
a new group of “social outcasts” that
disproportionately consists of AfricanAmerican males with low levels of
educational attainment.
cated men would be fifteen to twentyfive percent lower. This shift in the life
course from under employment to prison
admission was worsened by the punitive
politics that governed crime policy in the
1980s to present; therefore, as employment opportunities and wages decreased
for lower class men, the criminal justice system began targeting the streets.
In order to frame wage and employment inequality within the context of
incarceration employment and wage
data show that jail and prison records
significantly reduce earnings after release. When analyzing young unskilled
men, especially black men, the impact of
incarceration on employment is considerable. The correlations are even more
striking when looking at black men who
drop out of high school, found Western
and Pettit, and Lyons and Pettit. Thus,
by examining the effects of inequality
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