Prisons and our moral identity

After remaining flat for decades, the incarceration rate in the United States has shot up four-fold since 1980, Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist, points out in the latest Boston Review -- one of the most striking ways in which America differs from its peer nations. Though there are signs that some politicians are catching on to the significance of this development -- Senator James Webb (D., Virg.) said at a hearing on the subject last fall that our policies "test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity" -- so far the system churns on.

The mainstream press, Western argues, has made the American public aware of the two-to-one discrepancy between black and white unemployment rates, and, even more so, that there exists a three-to-one gulf in out-of-wedlock birthrates. Less often reported is the fact that blacks are jailed at a rate seven times that of whites. Explanations for the gap that look to character or cultural deficiencies, Western argues, fail to take into account the wholescale de-industrialization of central cities, leading to a lack of opportunity for unskilled men and, relatedly, a concentration of crime, drug abuse, and capture by police in poor neighborhoods.

One in five black men who has never been to college is in jail. And the prospect for steady employment and stable family lives for these men, post-incarceration is unlikely to say the least,

Western hails President Bush's signing of the Second Chance Act in April, which drew the support not just of advocates of drug-policy and penal reform but also of Christian conservatives. It provides money for literacy programs, drug treatment, and job-training for released offenders.

But for such a system to succeed at the scale the problem demands would cost billions -- money that could only be saved by trimming prison populations. And so far the methods that would have to be deployed in order to achieve that goal (decriminalizing many drug offenses, cutting back on re-imprisonment for "technical" violations of parole) do not have wide appeal.

P.S. I discussed Western's work, and that of other social-scientists studying the interaction between imprisonment and inequality, last fall.