Locked up, locked out: the social costs of incarceration.

AuthorWestern, Bruce

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Do prisons make us safer? By taking would-be offenders off the streets, prisons clearly have reduced crime in the short run. In the long run, though, imprisonment erodes the bonds of work, family, and community that help preserve public safety.

Three effects are fundamental. First, former prisoners do worse economically than if they had never been incarcerated. We can see some evidence in a study I conducted in 2004 with the Princeton sociologist Devah Pager. We ran an audit experiment that sent trained testers to apply for more than 1,000 entry-level jobs throughout New York City. The fake job applicants were dressed similarly, gave similar answers, and provided resumes with identical education and work experience. At each job interview, however, one randomly chosen tester would tick the application box indicating a criminal record and submit a resume that mentioned a prison and provided a parole officer as a reference.

White testers who were assigned a criminal record received call-backs or job offers from employers only half as often as testers with clean records. For African Americans, a criminal record reduced employment opportunities by two-thirds. Labor force data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth paint a similar picture of incarceration's negative effects: Wages fall by about 15 percent after prison, yearly earnings are reduced by about 40 percent, and the pay of former prisoners (unlike compensation for the rest of the labor force) remains stagnant as they get older.

The second important effect of imprisonment falls not on ex-inmates but on their families. About half of all prison and jail inmates are parents with children under 18. By 2008 about 2.6 million children had a parent in prison or jail. By age 17, one in four African-American youth has a father who has been sent to prison.

Because of their poor job prospects, formerly incarcerated fathers are less able to contribute financially to their families. Because incarceration strains marital relations, those fathers are also less involved as parents. Compared to otherwise similar kids whose parents haven't been behind bars, the children of incarcerated parents are more likely to be depressed, behave aggressively, and drop out of high school. These problems appear to be more common for boys than girls. Incarceration, it seems, is weakening the bonds between fathers and sons.

The third important effect of incarceration is cultural, shaping how...

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