Pubdate: Sun, 23 Sep 2007
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2007 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact:  http://www.boston.com/globe/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: Christopher Shea
Note: Christopher Shea's column appears regularly in Ideas.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?244 (Sentencing - United States)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)

LIFE SENTENCE

It's A Government Program Whose Impact Rivals the New Deal. It Pushes 
Whole Communities Out of Society's Mainstream. It Costs Tens of 
Billions of Dollars a Year. Scholars Are Just Beginning to Understand 
How Prison Is Reshaping the Country.

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.

Mass incarceration, 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 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 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, Pager found that her black 
applicants with criminal records got called for an interview - or to 
interview on the spot, as they applied in person - 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 Pager 
summarizes her findings. (Pager 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, 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.

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. (Some 9 percent of all black children now 
have a father in jail.)

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.

Black Americans' concerns about the justice system burst to the fore 
in Jena, La., last week when thousands protested prosecutors' tough 
treatment of six black teenagers after an assault on a white student. 
When Bobo looks broadly at black attitudes about the justice system, 
he doesn't find them irrational.

"We as a society," Bobo wrote last year, "have normalized and, for 
the time being, depoliticized a remarkable set of social conditions."

Policy makers 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, 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 Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and 
conservatives like Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) have cosponsored 
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 reentry into their communities.

A handful of cities, including Boston, no longer ask applicants for 
city jobs whether they have a criminal record, although their 
backgrounds can still be checked later. A growing "Ban the Box" 
movement - referring to the check-off box on an application, 
signaling a conviction - is designed to reduce the kind of upfront 
discrimination Pager identifies. San Francisco and St. Paul have also 
signed off on the idea, while Los Angeles is pondering it.

To these ideas, 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.

Such proposals would do nothing to roll back prison populations, but 
bills introduced by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Orrin Hatch 
(R-Utah), and Biden to raise the amount of crack cocaine that 
triggers automatic five- and ten-year sentences might do so. (The 
possession of crack - typically a drug of the poor, and specifically 
the black poor - is penalized far more harshly than the powdered 
cocaine preferred by middle- and upper-class drug users.) Bruce 
Western advocates ending mandatory minimum sentences for drug 
conviction, and adds some further thoughts about reducing prison 
populations: "We could be spending money and social services to 
reduce the risks that make people likely to go to prison in the first 
place - on drug addiction, on mental-health services, on housing."

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, and coverage in the mainstream media of the protests in 
Jena, "I do sense there is a public conversation beginning," Western says.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake