The social and moral cost of mass incarceration in African American communities.

• Author: Roberts, Dorothy E.

INTRODUCTION: REFRAMING THE ISSUE OF RACE AND IMPRISONMENT A. The Distinctive Features of African American Mass Incarceration 1. Total numbers incarcerated 2. Rate of incarceration 3. The spatial concentration of incarceration B. The New Direction of Prison Research 1. Assessing the harm of mass incarceration v. identifying the cause of racial disparities 2. Community v. individual as the focus of research I. THEORIES OF COMMUNITY HARM A. Mass Imprisonment Damages Social Networks B. Mass Imprisonment Distorts Social Norms C. Mass Imprisonment Destroys Social Citizenship 1. Felon disenfranchisement 2. Labor market exclusion 3. Civic isolation II. THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF COMMUNITY HARM A. Moving Beyond the Prison-Crime Nexus B. Mass Imprisonment and Political Subordination C. Rethinking the Justifications for Punishment CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION: REFRAMING THE ISSUE OF RACE AND IMPRISONMENT

Radical changes in crime control and sentencing policies led to an unprecedented buildup of the United States prison population over the last thirty years. (1) By the end of 2002, the number of inmates in the nation's jails and prisons exceeded two million. (2) Today's imprisonment rate is five times as high as in 1972 and surpasses that of all other nations. (3) The sheer scale and acceleration of U.S. prison growth has no parallel in western societies. As David Garland put it, "This is an unprecedented event in the history of the USA and, more generally, in the history of liberal democracy." (4)

The extraordinary prison expansion involved young black men in grossly disproportionate numbers. Achieving another historic record, most of the people sentenced to time in prison today are black. On any given day, nearly one-third of black men in their twenties are under the supervision of the criminal justice system--either behind bars, on probation, or on parole. (5) The gap between black and white incarceration rates, moreover, has deepened along with rising inmate numbers. (6) African Americans experience a uniquely astronomical rate of imprisonment, and the social effects of imprisonment are concentrated in their communities. Thus, the transformation of prison policy at the turn of the twenty-first century is most accurately characterized as the mass incarceration of African Americans. (7)

The mass incarceration of African Americans coincides with a new era in criminal justice research. Social scientists are increasingly applying empirical methods to understand the impact of crime control policies and to supply data to judges, legislators, and policymakers. (8) The distinctive features of African American mass incarceration have generated a new research agenda that reframes the typical questions asked about the racial disparity in imprisonment and that better measures the costs and benefits of prison policy. The new research also puts in striking relief the question of the morality of confining so many American citizens.

In the rest of this Introduction, I describe the distinctive features of both African American mass incarceration and the new direction in prison research examining this phenomenon. I also discuss how these empirical studies reframe the issue of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. Part I identifies three theories that explain the social mechanisms through which mass incarceration inflicts community-level harms. Part II argues that mounting evidence of mass imprisonment's damage to African American communities should change the outcome of dominant deliberations about the moral justifications for current penal approaches to punishment. This evidence demolishes utilitarian claims that high incarceration rates uniformly benefit black communities and reveals, to the contrary, how they entrench black communities' political subordination. I conclude, therefore, that the mass incarceration of African Americans is not only morally unjustifiable, but morally repugnant.

1. The Distinctive Features of African American Mass Incarceration

   1. Total numbers incarcerated.

   The first feature of mass incarceration is simply the sheer numbers of African Americans behind bars. Of the two million inmates in U.S. jails and prisons at the end of 2002, black men (586,700) outnumbered white men (436,800) and Hispanic men (235,000) among inmates with sentences of more than one year. (9) African American women were also imprisoned in record numbers. (10) As with men, there were more black women (36,000) than white women (35,400) and Hispanic women (15,000) in jails and prisons at the end of 2002. (11)

   2. Rate of incarceration.

   The massive scale of black citizens behind bars is matched in its enormity by the rate of black imprisonment. The Sentencing Project first alerted the public to this alarming dimension of incarceration in a report issued in 1990. (12) It revealed that almost one in four black men in the United States between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine were under control of the criminal justice system, either in prison or jail, on probation, or on parole. (13) By 1995, the Sentencing Project reported that the national rate had risen to one-in-three. (14) In Washington, D.C. and Baltimore more than half of young black men were then under criminal supervision. Prison is now a common and predictable experience for African American men in their twenties. Although rates of female incarceration are far lower, "African-American women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population." (15) This astounding rate of imprisonment for African Americans, moreover, departs drastically from the rate for whites. Blacks are about eight times more likely to spend time behind bars than whites. (16)

   The War on Drugs is responsible for this level of black incarceration. The explosion of both the prison population and its racial disparity are largely attributable to aggressive street-level enforcement of the drug laws and harsh sentencing of drug offenders. (17) An increasingly large proportion of new admissions for drug offenses combined with longer mandatory sentences to keep prison populations at historically high levels during the 1990s, despite declines in crime. (18) The War on Drugs became its own prisoner-generating machine, producing incarcerations rates that "defy gravity and continue to grow even as crime rates are dropping." (19) In New York City, for example, drug-related arrests increased throughout the 1990s and accounted for a growing share of prison admissions during a time when felony crimes declined by almost 50%. (20)

   The population confined under tough drug laws, moreover, is composed predominantly of young, African American men. (21) Although whites have a higher rate of illegal drug use, 60% of offenders imprisoned for drug charges in 1998 were black. (22) Drug offenses accounted for 27% of the increase in the number of African American state prisoners in the 1990s, compared to a 14% increase for whites. (23) Drug enforcement, then, provided a steady supply of African American inmates to the nation's prisons over the course of three decades and "across distinctly different crime 'eras.'" (24)

   3. The spatial concentration of incarceration.

   Because poor black men and women tend to live in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods, these neighborhoods feel the brunt of the staggering prison figures. Research in several cities reveals that the exit and reentry of inmates is geographically concentrated in the poorest, minority neighborhoods. (25) As many as 1 in 8 of the adult male residents of these urban areas is sent to prison each year and 1 in 4 is behind bars on any given day. (26) A 1992 study, for example, showed that 72% of all of New York State's prisoners came from only 7 of New York City's 55 community board districts. (27) Similarly, 53% of Illinois prisoners released in 2001 returned to Chicago, and 34% of those releases were concentrated in 6 of 77 Chicago communities. (28) Prisoners typically return to the same communities where they lived prior to incarceration. (29)

   Using maps showing the concentration of incarceration in New York City over time, Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West, and Jan Holland found that incarceration rates remained high or intensified by 1996 in neighborhoods that had the highest rates in 1990. (30) Their analysis shows not only that incarceration is persistently concentrated in New York City's poorest neighborhoods, but also that these neighborhoods received more intensive and punitive police enforcement and parole surveillance throughout a period of general decline in crime. (31) Finding "evidence that at some tipping point, incarceration remains stable or continues to increase even as crime--the supply of individuals for incarceration--remains constant or declines," (32) the study suggests that incarceration's spatial concentration induces more incarceration.

2. The New Direction of Prison Research

   These distinctive features of African American incarceration--the sheer numbers in prison, the high rate of imprisonment, and its spatial concentration--combine to make imprisonment a normal way of life in the communities where it is concentrated. These residents live in "the first genuine prison society of history." (33) How can researchers measure the impact of mass incarceration on these communities? Ernest Drucker approached this problem with a quantitative public health method--"years of life lost"--commonly used to measure the population impact of large-scale adverse events that affect entire populations. (34) He treated person-years of incarceration as years of life "lost" to estimate the magnitude of impact associated with mass imprisonment in New York State during the period from 1973 to 2002. Drucker concluded,

   [T]hirty years of forced removal to prison of 150,000 young males from particular communities of New York represents collective losses similar in scale to the losses due to epidemics, wars, and terrorist attacks--with the potential for...