Life in the Disneyesque Gulag (aka the US of A):
Life sentence: How prison is reshaping the U.S.
By Christopher Shea The Boston Globe
Published: September 24, 2007
WHAT if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed? And what if, instead of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multibillion-dollar project steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American mainstream?
That's how America should think about its growing prison system, some leading social scientists are saying, in research that suggests prisons have a far deeper impact on the nation than simply punishing criminals.
Fueled by the war on drugs, "three-strike" laws, and mandatory minimum sentences, America's prisons and jails now house some 2.2 million inmates - roughly seven times the figure of the early 1970s. And Americans are investing vast resources to keep the system running: The cost to maintain American correctional institutions is some $60 billion a year.
For years sociologists saw prisons - with their disproportionately poor, black, and uneducated populations - partly as mirrors of the social and economic disparities that cleave American life. Now, however, a new crop of books and articles are looking at the penal system not just as a reflection of society, but a force that shapes it.
In this view, the system takes men with limited education and job skills and stigmatizes them in a way that makes it hard for them to find jobs, slashes their wages when they do find them, and brands them as bad future spouses. The effects of imprisonment ripple out from prisoners, breaking up families and further impoverishing neighborhoods, creating the conditions for more crime down the road. Prisons have grown into potent "engines of inequality," in the words of sociologist Bruce Western; the penal system, he and other scholars suggest, actively widens the gap between the poor - especially poor black men - and everyone else.
"This is a historic transformation of the character of American society," says Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist who has begun to write on this topic, most recently in the Boston Review. "We are managing the losers by confinement."
The shift isn't just academic. In national politics, concern about the people who actually go to prison has been drowned out by tough-on-crime rhetoric, but today the issue is getting a hearing from some politicians, and not just hard-left liberals. On Oct. 4, Congress's Joint Economic Committee will hear testimony from Western, Loury, and others on the economic and social costs of the prison boom. The session will be chaired by Jim Webb, the gruff, moderate Democratic Senator from Virginia. Cities including Boston and San Francisco are changing their hiring practices to destigmatize prisoners, and there is detectable momentum in Congress toward reducing the extraordinarily harsh minimum sentences for possession of crack cocaine, which disproportionately affect poor black Americans.
The issue has arrived on the public agenda in part because of the work done by a handful of leading sociologists. Western's 2006 book "Punishment and Inequality in America" is a key work in this new scholarly movement. Devah Pager, a Princeton sociologist, has been making headlines since her dissertation, completed in 2002 at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated how a criminal record - even for nonviolent drug offenses - made it nearly impossible for black ex-convicts in Milwaukee to land a job. This month, a book based on that work, "Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration," appears in bookstores. And the sociologist Lawrence Bobo, who left Harvard for Stanford two years ago but is returning in January, has been investigating how the growing black prison population is eroding African-Americans' confidence in the rule of law.
For years, the penal system was a marginal topic among sociologists, catching the interest chiefly of professors with an interest in hard-core criminology. But in the past decade, discussion of incarceration has moved to the center of the field, in the work of respected scholars at top institutions who are interested in a broad understanding of American inequality.
"My sense of it is just that the sheer mass, the weight of the reality of what's happening, has sunk in," says Loury.
With black men in their early 30s more likely to have been in prison than to have graduated from college, and with 700,000 ex-prisoners reentering society each year, the trends cannot be ignored. The current US rate of some 750 prisoners per 100,000 citizens is several times higher than rates in Europe - higher, even, than the rates in formerly repressive states like Russia or South Africa.
In "Punishment and Inequality in America," Western documented the degree to which poor black communities across America live in a penitentiary shadow. Of black males born in the late 1960s who did not attend college, 30 percent have served time in prison, he pointed out. For high-school dropouts, the figure is a startling 59 percent. "I don't think the really deep penetration of the criminal justice system into poor and minority communities has been fully understood by people outside these communities," says Western.
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