Punishment and Inequality in America.

• Author: Beito, David T.
• Position: Book review

Punishment and Inequality in America

By Bruce Western

New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006.

Pp. xiv, 247. $29.95 cloth.

Over the past decade or so, the rate of violent crime has reached lows unseen in the United States since the early 1960s. Between 1993 and 2001, it plummeted by nearly half, and politicians scrambled to take credit. In 2008, for example, Rudy Giuliani's Web site triumphantly proclaimed that he "put more cops on the street and more criminals in jail. He cut crime in half and reduced murders by two-thirds." In Punishment and Inequality in America, Bruce Western tells the other side of the story. As crime fell during the last two decades of the twentieth century, the prison population soared, often with disastrous consequences for the most vulnerable in society. Between 1975 and 2001, the number of prison and jail inmates per one hundred thousand people rose more than threefold. By the beginning of the new century, the U.S. rate was six times higher than that of western Europe. Even crime-ridden and authoritarian Russia did not match that level.

The trend toward greater reliance on incarceration is relatively new in U.S. history. Until the 1970s, the rehabilitative model still predominated. The criminal-justice system emphasized corrective measures through such methods as indeterminate sentencing and parole. Many offenders served all or part of their time in community service. Parole officers, who often were purveyors of valuable job information, were the system's main gatekeepers. By the 1980s, the rehabilitative model had come under withering fire from politicians who pushed a punitive law-and-order approach. Many states had begun to phase out parole and to establish mandatory minimum sentences or otherwise to limit judicial discretion. "Three strikes and you're out" laws soon followed. Although Republicans formed the vanguard of these reforms, Democrats also joined. During the administration of George H. W. Bush, for example, Democratic senator Joseph Biden boasted that his proposed bill would establish "the death penalty for 51 offenses.... The President's bill calls for the death penalty on 46 offenses" (p. 61).

As states started to lock up more people, incarceration became almost a way of life for many groups in society. In 1980, for example, about one-tenth of black male high school dropouts between the ages twenty and forty were in jail, but by 2000 an astounding one-third were in this category. A black man in his...