Growing economic inequality in the United States has profound implications for understanding crime, criminal justice processing, and trends in mass incarceration. Although contemporary crime rates are at levels observed during the 1960s, punishment—through the use of incarceration— remains at historic highs. As the richest nation in the world, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country. According to the National Research Council, Americans represent less than 5% of the planet’s population, but U.S. inmates comprise nearly 25% of prisoners globally, and in 2014, more than 2.23 million Americans were behind bars, representing nearly 1% of the U.S. adult population.
The risk of incarceration is not distributed uniformly across the population. Men, non-Whites, high-school dropouts, and young adults have the highest risk of incarceration. As noted by Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, on any given day, one in three African American men under age 35 years who did not complete high school is behind bars. Pettit and colleagues also note that Black men’s lifetime risk of incarceration hovers close to 70% and that there are more young Black men who dropped out of high school behind bars than there are in the paid labor force.
The consequences of a criminal record are profound and cannot be ignored in assessments of increasing socioeconomic inequality. Former inmates convicted of felony offenses face barriers to employment, wage growth, housing, civic participation, and public assistance, all of which converge to impede successful reentry into society. The mark of a criminal record also deeply entrenches former inmates with nondischargeable debt for their criminal prosecutions and time served. With more than 850,000 inmates reentering society annually, successful reintegration largely depends on connecting former offenders with consistent work, permanent housing, and stable resources to limit their stress and hardship after prison.
The negative effects of incarceration also extend to the families of former offenders. Children are at an increased risk of child homelessness; internalizing and externalizing behaviors; food insecurity; and exposure to severe deprivation and material hardship, unmet health needs, and residential instability. Paternal incarceration also elevates the likelihood of severe depression among mothers, compromising the stability (including financial stability) of romantic relationships through an increased probability of divorce and relationship dissolution.
Contemporary social science evidence finds that the rise of mass incarceration is the result of poverty and inequality, not growing levels of crime. In particular, as discussed in this article, growing inequality in punishment is a response to two social forces: (1) the social inclusion and advancement of minorities after the civil rights movement and (2) structural changes in the labor market and criminal justice system during the late 20th century.
The Backlash Against Social Inclusion
Poverty, crime, and punishment have their antecedents in the historical context of racial relations in America as well as the structure of norms and opportunities available to disadvantaged groups. Classical criminological theory links crime and deviant behavior to economic strain and differential opportunities for success. In the late 1930s, Robert Merton argued that society determines success goals but that the structure of society facilitates or inhibits one’s success in achieving these goals. Cultural norms—such as hard work and perseverance—instruct people in the actions they may legitimately use to achieve cultural goals (e.g., occupational prestige, financial success), but institutional means (i.e., legal employment and formal education) represent the distribution of opportunities for achieving culture goals by legitimate means. Anomie—a breakdown in a person’s regulatory norms—ensues when there is a discordance between cultural goals and institutional means. Merton formulated a means–goals disjuncture that focuses on five adaptations, one of which is the innovator adaptation, whereby an individual retains the cultural goal but rejects the institutionalized means to achieve the goal.
Consequently, the frustration and injustice associated with trying to achieve cultural goals legitimately, through cultural norms and institutional opportunities, produces strain among the severely disadvantaged. Innovators often turn to criminal activity to obtain culturally defined markers of status and success. Yet, in the late 20th century, Robert Agnew argued that unjust treatment is a distinct category of strain, representing “the failure to achieve positively valued goals” given one’s inability to escape legally from painful encounters.
Mass incarceration is the latest institutional configuration to produce and maintain strain in the lives of disadvantaged men and women. Although civil rights legislation was supposed to ameliorate unequal and unjust treatment in employment, education, and voting, David Garland argued in 2001 that the civil rights movement of the 1960s produced a backlash against the social and economic inclusion of racial minorities, ushering in conservative penal policies that would maintain dominance over people of color and the economically disadvantaged. At around the same time, Loic Wacquant showed that this conservative backlash resulted in a social policy of mass incarceration that reified and reinforced forms of discrimination and unjust treatment akin to earlier systems of racial domination and social inequality: slavery and Jim Crow. The difference between these institutional configurations of inequality, however, is that under a system of mass incarceration, the poverty and hardship experienced by potential offenders and former inmates—housing restrictions, felon disenfranchisement, broken and displaced families, employment discrimination, wage disparities, and educational inequality—can be framed under a trope of individual responsibility instead of overt legal discrimination. Yet, changes in the economy and criminal justice system served to bolster conservative rhetoric around individual responsibility.
Structural Changes in the Labor Market and Criminal Justice System
The decline of manufacturing during the 1970s and 1980s transformed the social ecology of cities, thereby altering the fabric of everyday life for residents in the urban core. During the mid- to late20th century, the United States began to shift from a goods-producing, manufacturing-based economy to a service-oriented labor market. Manufacturing jobs required little skill and paid living wages. Many of these jobs were located in the inner cities of the United States. With the export of manufacturing jobs overseas, many urban residents with low levels of formal education were unprepared for a labor market that required additional skills and greater educational endowments. At the same time, the development of highways and suburbs allowed professional jobs and more economically advantaged families to move further away from the city center. As a result, concentrated poverty and economic strain in the urban core led to increasing social dislocations—crime, incarceration, teen pregnancy, and high-school dropout rates.
During the industrial decline, the labor force began to restructure itself into two distinct sectors that comprised a segmented (or dual) labor market. The U.S. labor force became dichotomized over time into primary and secondary workers, and these two workforces differ in employer and employee expectations, pay scales, autonomy, and other attributes of jobs. The behavioral rules under which the markets operate are also different. The secondary labor market is associated with menial tasks, employment instability, low wages and no benefits, and poor and unsafe working conditions. A key feature of the secondary labor market is that there is little to no chance of advancement. The primary labor market, on the other hand, is characterized by good wages, better working conditions, and a chance for advancement. Labor market segmentation is known to produce wage differentials by race, gender, and educational attainment.
The separation of markets occurred for a number of reasons, one of which was discrimination in the behavioral requirements imposed on the workforce. Extrapolating dual labor market theory to the illicit economy of crime, Kevin Bales argued that the secondary market uniquely structured, or routed, men into criminal careers due to the very nature of the market’s functioning. Economic research shows that street-level drug dealers are employed in both illicit and low-wage jobs, indicating that earnings from the illicit economy largely supplements, not supplants, secondary labor market earnings. Consequently, working in the illicit or informal economy may be an individual response to discrimination in low-wage labor markets and criminal justice surveillance. System avoidance—the surveillance of ex- offenders through the institutions of work, school, and banking—is a behavioral response for men who are routinely entangled in the criminal justice system and find themselves under constant threat of police apprehension, interrogation, and detention.
Economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment in the closing decades of the 20th century ensured the accelerating decline and increased hardship of the U.S. social state. Neoliberalism produced a new government of social insecurity that wedded supervisory workfare and prisonfare. Disciplinary workfare replaced protective welfare under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Welfare was then reconstituted as workfare, and the penal system was stripped of its rehabilitative illusions, forcing disadvantaged and marginalized populations off of public aid and holding them in confinement, especially if their alleged crime was welfare fraud.
As crime rates increased in inner cities during the 1980s, poor and blighted neighborhoods became extensively policed and surveilled, and criminal justice policies shifted to contain the threat of crime. Widespread shifts in policing, prosecution, and criminal codes changed at the local, state, and federal levels. Mandatory minimum sentences, truth-in-sentencing laws, and three-strikes legislation fueled the growth in mass incarceration, resulting in greater racial, economic, and educational inequality in incarceration, even as crime rates dropped to their 1960s’ levels.
The United States governs through a fear of crime, and the consequences can be particularly devastating for marginalized and disadvantaged individuals, their families, and their communities. Poor and non-White criminal defendants disproportionately access legal aid and the services of public defenders who often seek a plea bargain with prosecutors rather than to go to trial. Upon conviction, these defendants may owe thousands of dollars in fines, fees, restitution, attorney’s fees, and other court costs. This legal debt cannot be eliminated through bankruptcy, and these monetary sanctions may lead to wage and tax garnishments depending on the state. In some jurisdictions, failure to make payments toward these legal debts can trigger technical violations for probationers and parolees, resulting in their reincarceration when no new criminal offense has been committed. With a criminal conviction that limits or prevents future employment and a justice system seeking financial remuneration, former offenders are expected to reintegrate—both socially and economically—into a society that has marginalized them, in part, due to their preexisting socioeconomic status.
Conclusion
Since 1972, mass incarceration continued a steady ascent for over 35 years. Research has shown that growth in imprisonment is not due to increases in crime or criminality but to a host of political, legal, and economic changes during the remaining decades of the 20th century. Structural changes in the labor market and criminal justice system, as well as the backlash to civil rights legislation, have contributed to growing racial and economic inequality in the United States. The social exclusion of inner-city residents and former offenders—through the neoliberal policies of economic deregulation, welfare reform, and mass punishment—creates economic and psychological strain that deeply entrenches and criminalizes poverty among the most disadvantaged members of society.
References:
- Garland, D. (2001). The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Pettit, B. (2012). Invisible men: Mass incarceration and the myth of black progress. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
- Wacquant, L. (2001). Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh. Punishment & Society, 3(1), 95–134.
- Wacquant, L. (2010). Crafting the neoliberal state: Workfare, prisonfare, and social insecurity. Sociological Forum, 25(2), 197–220.
- Western, B. (2006). Punishment and inequality in America. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.