Former Prospect intern Elizabeth Henderson has a Q&A with Princeton's Bruce Western, author of Punishment and Inequality in America. Some quotes:
This got me thinking about the penal system as an institution that affected the poor in the United States in a way that was similar to the effect of welfare state structures on the lives of the poor in Europe.[...]
At the current time there are very high rates of incarceration, which means that young black men with low levels of schooling can fully expect to go to prison at some point during young adulthood. After they come out of prison, they do very poorly in the labor market and their family lives are disrupted. A steady job and a stable family life -- and, particularly, a stable marriage -- are important keys to desistance from crime. Because the penal system has these social impacts on economic opportunities, the involvement of families in crime is perpetuated over the life course by incarceration. [...]
When we actually calculated the estimates, we were finding that one in three black men now in their mid-30s had prison records, and that one in three black men who hadn't been to college now had prison records; and if they had dropped out of high school the number was two in three. These were astonishingly high numbers and initially we thought we'd made mistakes in our calculations. We only have to go back 20 years to find a time when the penal system was not a pervasive presence in the lives of young black men.
I've got to run, so I'm not going to say a whole lot about all this, but the impact of our criminal justice system on the African-American community is virtually incalculable. You can take about any problematic trend -- low marriage rates, say, where a vast number of men are totally out of the pool due to incarceration and an even larger group is relatively less attractive due to past incarceration and its effects -- and the system comes to bear on it. If I had more time, I'd relate this to The Wire so I could be one of the cool bloggers, but I don't, so I won't.
