Pubdate: Sun, 07 Oct 2007
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2007 The Dallas Morning News
Contact:  http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Author: Christopher Shea
Note: Christopher Shea is a freelance writer in Boston.

SENTENCED FOR LIFE

What if our prison system wasn't just a reflection of society - but a 
force that shaped it? CHRISTOPHER SHEA explores a new way of looking 
at lock-up.

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 as 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. "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 heard testimony from 
Dr. Western, Dr. Loury, and others on the economic and social costs 
of the prison boom; the session was 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. Dr. 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 sociologist Lawrence Bobo 
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 Dr. 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 
re-entering society each year, the trends cannot be ignored.

The current U.S. 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, Dr. 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," he says. Mass incarceration, 
Dr. Western argues, also renders invisible a substantial portion of 
American poverty.

At the height of the tech boom in 2000, he points out, 65 percent of 
black male high school dropouts weren't working. Government 
statistics, however, said the unemployment level of this group was 33 
percent, because government surveys exclude prisoners. At the root of 
prison's broader social impact lies its lingering effect on individual lives.

In an ideal penal system, prisoners might exit the system having paid 
their debt to society and be more or less restored to their previous 
status as free men and women.

But Dr. Pager's book demonstrates just how detached from reality that 
view is. She had four college students, two black and two white, pose 
as applicants for low-level jobs in Milwaukee (excluding jobs where a 
criminal record would have disqualified them). They used resumes that 
were nearly identical - high school degrees, steady progress from 
entry-level work to a supervisory position - except that in some 
cases the applicant had a drug conviction in his past (possession 
with intent to distribute) for which he served an 18-month sentence 
and then behaved perfectly on parole.

In surveys conducted by Dr. Pager, 62 percent of Milwaukee employers 
said they'd consider hiring an applicant with a nonviolent drug 
offense in his past. But in her field study, she found that her black 
applicants with criminal records were asked for an interview a mere 5 
percent of the time. That compared with 14 percent for the black 
applicants without a criminal record. Meanwhile, the white applicants 
with a record were called back 17 percent of the time, compared with 
34 percent for the white men lacking the blotch on their resume. "Two 
strikes" - blackness and a record - "and you're out" is how Dr. Pager 
summarizes her findings. (She has replicated this study in New York 
City, with similar results.) Job prospects for black ex-prisoners in 
Milwaukee may be even worse in the future, Dr. Pager argues in 
Marked, because while the vast majority of job growth is in the 
suburbs, the gap between employers' receptiveness to black and white 
ex-convicts is even wider there.

Dr. Western explores the same set of post-prison issues on a broader 
statistical canvas.

He found that whites, Hispanics and blacks all face a hit in their 
wages of about a third, relative to their peers, when they emerge 
from prison and also work fewer weeks per year. Their peers will see 
significant raises from ages 25 to 35, but the ex-prisoners won't, 
widening the gap. Former prisoners, too, are far less likely ever to 
marry, but no less likely to have kids, meaning that prisons 
contribute to the epidemic of female-headed, single-parent households.

Sociologists and a few politicians are not the only ones aware of 
these trends, argues Lawrence Bobo. Black Americans interpret them as 
evidence of stark racism, according to surveys he's done. 
Seventy-nine percent of white Americans, for example, think drug laws 
are enforced fairly, compared with 34 percent of black Americans.

Policymakers are slowly beginning to reckon with some aspects of 
these developments. In 2004, President Bush, in his State of the 
Union address, acknowledged some of the challenges caused by mass 
incarceration, Dr. Pager points out, describing the hundreds of 
thousands exiting prisons annually as a "group of Americans in need 
of help." And this year liberals like Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and 
conservatives like Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., have co-sponsored the 
so-called Second Chance Act. It would provide $192 million for drug 
counseling, family counseling, housing and mentorship for 
ex-offenders to assist their re-entry into their communities. And a 
handful of cities no longer ask applicants for city jobs whether they 
have a criminal record, although their backgrounds can still be 
checked later. To these ideas, Dr. Pager would add a policy modeled 
on how we treat debtors: After a certain amount of time, records of 
most convictions, especially for nonviolent offenses, would be expunged.

Stigma would have a deadline. And Dr. Western advocates ending 
mandatory minimum sentences for drug conviction.

In a campaign year, the prison issue is a tough one - such arguments 
don't have the easy pull on voters that "tough on crime" policies do. 
Yet with Congress calling prison experts to testify about their 
research, "I do sense there is a public conversation beginning," Dr. 
Western says. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake