Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | Social Research

The impacts of incarceration on public safety.

Article Excerpt
IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW WE WILL TAKE A LOOK INSIDE THE BLACK box of the largest penal experiment in world history: the quintupling of the prison population in the United States between 1973 and 2006. A central question that emerges and that will be our focus is: What have been the social consequences of our incarceration policy?

One objective is to provide insight into what might be called the prison policy paradox, namely, that a 500 percent generation-long growth in imprisonment has had little impact on crime. Broadly speaking, crime rates today are about what they were in 1973, though they have fluctuated dramatically over the 33-year time span since then. Beginning in 1973, crime rates went up into the early 1980s, went down for a few years at the end of that decade, went back up again, and then experienced a lengthy downward trend starting in the late 1990s. Prison populations, on the other hand, have risen every year since 1990. The rate of growth, however, appears to be waning since about 2000. The prison policy paradox is that a systemic and sustained growth in incarceration can be accompanied by such sporadic changes in rates of crime, and leave the crime rate essentially unchanged over a generation of the accelerated use of the prison. How can this happen?

Answers are provided by looking inside the black box of penal policy and by identifying the various ways incarceration leads to social outcomes that are associated with public safety. This essay considers the problem of "public safety" (as opposed to rates of crime) because safety is a broader concept than crime. Though a desire for public safety includes a desire for low rates of crime, public safety connotes the more profound interest we have to live in a society where we feel secure pursuing our personal goals and fulfilling our life desires (Smith, 2001). Using public safety as our criteria enables us to consider the ways incarceration affects our quality of life, especially through the way incarceration affects the informal social relations that promote the kind of profound social control that is a foundation for a sense of feeling safe.

Three types of effects are described. Positive effects are those that improve public safety, negative effects reduce public safety, and "ambivalent" effects have the capacity to be both positive and negative. Five levels of social impacts on public safety are assessed:

* Effects on individuals that change the way people act;

* Effects on intimate relationships such as those with families and other loved ones;

* Effects on social relationships that are felt as community-level outcomes;

* Effects on institutions such as labor markets and the political economy;

* Effects on democracy or social justice.

This essay will summarize what is known, empirically and experientially, about the positive and negative ways incarceration affects levels of social expression. There are two especially important aspects of incarceration that bear on this review: what incarceration does, and to whom.

What incarceration does is to remove people from places for a period of time, then return them to those (or other) places changed by having experienced confinement. This sounds obvious, but when people consider the implications of incarceration as a policy they rarely do so with this simple cycle in mind. They think, often, of the potential benefits of removing a criminally active person from the community. But that is not what happens; at least, that is not all that happens. For the overwhelming majority of people who are sent to prison, what actually happens is a cycle: they are removed from the streets, confined for two or three years, then returned to the community. Many of those who go through this process once--at least a third--end up going through it multiple times, returning to prison for new crimes or failing to comply with the special burdens we place on those who leave prison. Many of the social impacts of incarceration stem from this cycling process.

This cycling process is not applied to a representative sample of Americans or places. Prison cycling concentrates within a subset of Americans. Men are at least eight times more likely to be in prison than women (for simplicity, we generally refer to people in prison in the masculine in this essay, even though many of the points we make apply to women in prison as well). African Americans are in prison at a rate four times higher than their proportion of the population and six times higher than whites. The average age at first prison admission is in the mid-20s, making incarceration, at least in the first instance, a young person's experience. Those who go to prison lack human capital; half have not finished high school and almost a third were unemployed at the time of the crime that put them behind bars (Petersilia, 2003). Finally, and importantly, the people who go to prison come disproportionately from a handful of neighborhoods, impoverished places where schools are bad, the labor market weak, and housing inadequate (for a review of the ways incarceration concentrates among these groups, see Clear, forthcoming). This means that the social effects of incarceration are hyperconcentrated among young, poor, black men and in the communities from which they come. Because many of these young men go through...