Bruce Western

Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration

Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the past twenty-five years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at different levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.

The Labor Market Consequences of Incarceration

Rapid growth in the incarceration rate over the past two decades has made prison time a routine event in the life course of young, economically disadvantaged Black and Hispanic men. Although incarceration may now have large effects on economic inequality, only a few studies systematically examine the labor market experiences of ex-offenders. We review the mechanisms that plausibly link incarceration to employment and earnings and discuss the challenges of causal inference for a highly self-selected sample of criminal offenders. There is little consensus about the labor market effects of a variety of justice system sanctions, but there is consistent evidence for the negative effects of prison time on earnings, particularly among older or white-collar offenders. The labor market effects of incarceration are not yet well understood, but prior research suggests several promising avenues for future work.

How Unregulated Is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution1

Comparative research contrasts the corporatist welfare states of Europe with the unregulated U.S. labor market to explain low rates of U.S. unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, this article argues that the U.S. state made a large and coercive intervention into the labor market through the expansion of the penal system. The impact of incarceration on unemployment has two conflicting dynamics. In the short run, U.S. incarceration lowers conventional unemployment measures by removing able‐bodied, working‐age men from labor force counts. In the long run, social survey data show that incarceration raises unemployment by reducing the job prospects of ex‐convicts. Strong U.S. employment performance in the 1980s and 1990s has thus depended in part on a high and increasing incarceration rate.

The Black Family and Mass Incarceration

Released in 1965, the Moynihan Report traced the severe social and economic distress of poor urban African Americans to high rates of single-parenthood. Against Moynihans calls for social investment in poor inner-city communities, politics moved in a punitive direction, driving massive growth in the prison population. The authors document the emergence of mass incarceration and describe its significance for African American family life. The era of mass incarceration can be understood as a new stage in the history of American racial inequality. Because of its recent arrival, the social impact of mass incarceration remains poorly understood. The authors conclude by posing several key research questions that can illuminate the effects of dramatic growth in the American penal system.

Unions, Norms, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution’s shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions’ effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education.

Black-white wage inequality, employment rates, and incarceration

The observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks, who suffer from a high rate of joblessness. The authors estimate the black‐white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity. Among working‐age men in 1999, accounting for labor inactivity—including prison and jail incarceration—leads to an increase of 7%–20% in the black‐white wage gap. Adjusting for sample selectivity among men ages 22–30 in 1999 increases the wage gap by as much as 58%. Increasing selection bias, which can be attributed to incarceration and conventional joblessness, explains about two‐thirds of the rise in black relative wages among young men between 1985 and 1998. Apparent improvement in the economic position of young black men is thus largely an artifact of rising joblessness fueled by the growth in incarceration during the 1990s.

The deterrent effect of arrest in incidents of domestic violence: A Bayesian analysis of four field experiments.

We examine the deterrent effect of arrest in incidents of spouse abuse. The data are from field experiments conducted in four cities o Milwaukee, Omaha, Dade County (Florida), and Colorado Springs. On the average, arrest is no more effective than other police interventions in reducing new incidents of violence. However, arrest has differential effects on subsequent violence depending on the background of the offender. The implications of the findings for social science theory and public policy are discussed. (Abstract Adapted from Source: American Sociological Review, 1992. Copyright

Incarceration & social inequality

In the last few decades the institutional contours of American social inequality have been transformed by the rapid growth in the prison and jail population. America’s prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As an outcast group, the men and women in our prisons and jails, have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream. Social and economic disadvantage, crystallizing in penal confinement, is sustained over the life course and transmitted from one generation to the next. This is a profound institutionalized inequality that has renewed race and class disadvantage. Still the scale and empirical details are largely an unknown story. In this paper we describe some new research outlining several of the latest trends in incarceration and their social and economic impact. Though the rate of incarceration is historically high, perhaps the most important social fact is the inequality in penal confinement, producing extraordinary rates of ∗We gratefully acknowledge Bryan Sykes, Deirdre Bloome, and Chris Muller helped conduct the research reported in this paper.

Paternal Incarceration and Support for Children in Fragile Families

High U.S. incarceration rates have motivated recent research on the negative effects of imprisonment on later employment, earnings, and family relationships. Because most men in jail and prison are fathers, a large number of children may be placed at considerable risk by policies of incarceration. This article examines one dimension of the economic risk faced by children of incarcerated fathers: the reduction in the financial support that they receive. We use a population-based sample of urban children to examine the effects of incarceration on this support. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal regressions indicate that formerly incarcerated men are less likely to contribute to their families, and those who do contribute provide significantly less. The negative effects of incarceration on fathers’ financial support are due not only to the low earnings of formerly incarcerated men but also to their increased likelihood to live apart from their children. Men contribute far less through child support (formal or informal) than they do when they share their earnings within their household, suggesting that the destabilizing effects of incarceration on family relationships place children at significant economic disadvantage.

Incarceration in Fragile Families

Since the mid-1970s the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased roughly fivefold. As Christopher Wildeman and Bruce Western explain, the effects of this sea change in the imprisonment rate—commonly called mass imprisonment or the prison boom—have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little schooling.Imprisonment diminishes the earnings of adult men, compromises their health, reduces familial resources, and contributes to family breakup. It also adds to the deficits of poor children, thus ensuring that the effects of imprisonment on inequality are transferred intergenerationally. Perversely, incarceration has its most corrosive effects on families whose fathers were involved in neither domestic violence nor violent crime before being imprisoned. Because having a parent go to prison is now so common for poor, minority children and so negatively affects them, the authors argue that mass imprisonment may increase future racial and class inequality—and may even lead to more crime in the long term, thereby undoing any benefits of the prison boom.U.S. crime policy has thus, in the name of public safety, produced more vulnerable families and reduced the life chances of their children. Wildeman and Western advocate several policy reforms, such as limiting prison time for drug offenders and for parolees who violate the technical conditions of their parole, reconsidering sentence enhancements for repeat offenders, and expanding supports for prisoners and ex-prisoners.But Wildeman and Western argue that criminal justice reform alone will not solve the problems of school failure, joblessness, untreated addiction, and mental illness that pave the way to prison. In fact, focusing solely on criminal justice reforms would repeat the mistakes the nation made during the prison boom: trying to solve deep social problems with criminal justice policies. Addressing those broad problems, they say, requires a greater social commitment to education, public health, and the employment opportunities of low-skilled men and women. The primary sources of order and stability—public safety in its wide sense—are the informal social controls of family and work. Thus, broad social policies hold the promise not only of improving the well-being of fragile families, but also, by strengthening families and providing jobs, of contributing to public safety.