Mass Incarceration and Racial Inequality

• Author: Becky Pettit,Carmen Gutierrez
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12241
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018

Mass Incarceration and Racial Inequality

BECKY PETTIT * and CARMEN GUTIERREZ

†

ABSTRACT . Despite two decades of declining crime rates, the United

States continues to incarcerate a historically and comparatively large

segment of the population. Moreover, incarceration and other forms

of criminal justice contact ranging from police stops to community

supervision are disproportionately concentrated among African

American and Latino men. Mass incarceration, and other ways in

which the criminal justice system infiltrates the lives of families, has

critical implications for inequality. Differential rates of incarceration

damage the social and emotional development of children whose par-

ents are in custody or under community supervision. The removal

through incarceration of a large segment of earners reinforces existing

income and wealth disparities. Patterns of incarceration and felony

convictions have devastating effects on the level of voting, political

engagement, and overall trust in the legal system within communities.

Incarceration also has damaging effects on the health of families and

communities. In short, the costs of mass incarceration are not simply

collateral consequences for individuals but are borne collectively ,

most notably by African Americans living in acutely disadvantaged

communities that experience high levels of policing and surveillance.

In this article, we review racial and ethnic differences in exposure to

the criminal justice system and its collective consequences.

American Journ al of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, Nos. 3-4 (May-September, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.1224 1

© 2018 The American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

*

Barbara Pierce Bush Regents Profes sor of Liberal Arts in Sociolog y at the University

of Texas–Austin. Her most recent book , Invisible Men: Mas s Incarceration and the Myth

of Black Progress (Russell Sa ge Foundation 2012), investigate s how decades of growth

in America ’ s prisons and jails obscu res basic accounts of racial i nequality. Email:

bpettit@utexas.edu. Th is research was supporte d by grant P2CHD04 2849, Population

Research Center, awarded to the Population Resea rch Center at the University of Texas

at Austin by the Eunice Kenne dy Shriver National Institute of Chi ld Health and Human

Development. The content is solely the responsibil ity of the authors and does not

necessarily represent t he official views of the National Institutes of Healt h.

†

Assistant Professor i n the Department of P ublic Policy at the University of Nor th

Ca rol ina at C hap el H il l. H er r ese ar ch e xpl ore s is sue s at the int er sec tio n of st rat ifi cat io n,

the crimin al justice system, and he alth, with an emphasi s on how inequalities ar ise

across race, ethnicit y, and citi zenship. Email: carmen.gutierrez@ utexas.edu.

1154 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

Introduction

Despite two decades of declining crime rates and significant and sus-

tained policy attention to criminal justice reform, the United States

continues to incarcerate a comparatively large segment of the popu-

lation. (For a discussion of some recent policy initiatives, see Obama

( 2017 ).) The United States experienced unprecedented increases in

the volume and rate of incarceration between the mid-1970s and the

first decade of the 2000s. The number of individuals incarcerated in

America’s prisons and jails peaked in 2008, when just over 2.3 mil-

lion people, or 1 in 100 adults, were behind bars. Recent estimates

suggest that close to 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United

States on any given day (Carson 2018 ). Figure 1 shows that although

Figure 1

Incarceration and crime trends in t he U.S., 1980–2016.

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics ( 1980 –2016 ) for incarceration

rates. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation ( 19 80– 2016 ) for crime rates. U.S.

National Cancer Institute ( 1969 –2017 ) for resident population of the

United States.

Note: The incarceration rate includes prison a nd jail inmates.

1

The adult population includes all U.S. residents ages 18 and older.

2

The population includes all U.S. residents of all ages.