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Mass imprisonment and economic inequality.

Article Excerpt
THE GROWTH OF PENAL POPULATION THROUGH THE LAST DECADES of the twentieth century reshaped the institutional landscape of American poverty and inequality. The effects of rising incarceration rates have been especially large for young minority men with little schooling.

We are currently living in an era of "mass imprisonment." Under mass imprisonment, the experience of incarceration is so pervasive among some social groups as to be a defining feature of their collective experience--incarceration characterizes the group and influences their life chances. Evidence for this claim can be seen in estimates of incarceration rates and lifetime risks of imprisonment for recent birth cohorts of white and black men at different levels of schooling. These statistics show that young black men with little schooling became pervasively involved with the criminal justice system by the late 1990s.

This historically novel and highly concentrated rate of incarceration has two profound effects on American economic inequality. First, mass imprisonment generates invisible inequality. Our official statistics and data sources that measure the economic well-being of the population do not count those who are institutionalized. The large labor force surveys that measure the unemployment rate, for example, are drawn from samples of households. Because prison inmates are not included in these surveys, employment rates are significantly overstated among people most likely to go to prison. Once we factor in the effects of invisible inequality through the late 1990s, we see that the economic expansion did very little to improve the economic status of young black men with no college education.

In addition to invisible inequality, incarceration reduces the life chances of former inmates after they are released. Through the stigma of a criminal conviction, the diminished human capital from time out of the labor force, and the weakened social connections to legitimate employment opportunities, incarceration reduces the wages and employment of those serving time in prison. Not only does incarceration reduce pay and employment, it also limits the kinds of jobs that are available to formerly incarcerated workers. Career jobs requiring a high level of trust, skill, credentials, or well-placed social connections are largely out of reach for those with prison records. As a result, incarceration channels former inmates into the secondary labor market in which employment is precarious and there are few prospects for mobility. In this way, the growth of the American penal system has hardened the lines of social disadvantage. We usually study prisons and jails in the context of their effects on crime. By calculating the scope of mass imprisonment, the penal system becomes important not chiefly for its effects on crime, but for its effects on social inequality.

MASS IMPRISONMENT

The scale of the penal system is usually measured by an incarceration rate. The incarceration rate records of the number of people in prison or jail on a given day per 100,000 of the population. Figure 1 compares the US incarceration rate in 2004 to the incarceration rates of the longstanding democracies of Western Europe. The penal systems of Western Europe locked up, on average, about 100 per 100,000. The United States by contrast incarcerated more than seven times the European average, with an incarceration rate of over 700 per 100,000.

The contemporary scale of criminal punishment is also historically unusual. Although we do not have long-time series of the total penal population of prison and jail inmates, there are data on the state and federal prison populations extending back to 1925. The time series in Figure 2 shows that between 1925 and 1973, the fraction of the US population in state and federal prison varied in a narrow range around 100 per 100,000--close to the total incarceration rates in Western Europe. From 1974, the prison population began to grow, and the incarceration rate increased continuously for the next three decades. By 2005, nearly 2.2 million people were in custody, either in prison for felony convictions or in local jails awaiting trial or serving short sentences. These figures do not fully reflect the contemporary correctional population. In 2005, another 784,000 men and women were under community supervision on parole while 4.1 million people were on probation. The total population under correctional supervision thus includes more than 7 million people, or about 3.1 percent of all US adults (Glaze and Bonczar, 2006).

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The broad significance of the penal system for American social inequality results from extreme social and economic disparities in incarceration. More than 90 percent of all prison and jail inmates are men. Women's incarceration rates have increased more quickly than men's in the twenty years after 1980, but the main effect of the prison boom on gender relations is due precisely to the approximate fact that men go to prison, while women are left in free society to raise families and contend with former prisoners returning home after release. These men are young, of working age, many with small children. About two-thirds of state prisoners are over 18 years of age but under 35. With this age pattern, only a small number of people are incarcerated at any point in time, but many more pass through the penal system at some point in their lives.

Incarceration is also concentrated among the disadvantaged. Large race and class disparities in imprisonment reinforce lines of social disadvantage. High incarceration rates among low-status and minority men are unmistakable. The 1997 survey of state and federal prisoners shows that state inmates average less than 11 years of schooling. A third were not working at the time of their incarceration, and the average wage of the remainder is much lower than that of other men with the same level of education. African Americans and Hispanics also have higher incarceration rates than whites. Blacks and Hispanics together account for about two-thirds of the state prison population. The black-white disparity in imprisonment is especially large. Black men are six to eight times more likely to be in prison than whites.

The demographic contours of imprisonment produced large differences in incarceration rates across the population (see table 1). Through the last two decades of the twentieth century the national incarceration rate of the United States grew from about one-fifth of 1 percent of the population to seven-tenths of 1 percent. Because nearly all prison and jail inmates are men of working age, the incarceration rate in this group is...