Young Black Men, The Economy, Crime, And Punishment

Via Ezra, an interesting interview with Bruce Western, author of Punishment And Inequality In America. Here’s a couple of sample quotes:

What were some of the striking elements of your research?

There were two things that I found particularly striking. The first was the very high rates of incarceration among young black men, in particular if they haven’t been to college. When we actually calculated the estimates, we were finding that one in three black men now in their mid-30s had prison records, and that one in three black men who hadn’t been to college now had prison records; and if they had dropped out of high school the number was two in three. These were astonishingly high numbers and initially we thought we’d made mistakes in our calculations. We only have to go back 20 years to find a time when the penal system was not a pervasive presence in the lives of young black men.

The other surprising element involved reexamining labor market trends, particularly during the 1990s. The story about the 1990s was that economic growth and the labor market were so strong, particularly at the end of the 1990s, that the market was finally providing benefits to very marginal workers — young men with less than a college education — and their employment rates and wages were apparently increasing. All of these statistics, of course, don’t take into account the fact that a growing share of that population is increasingly in prison and doesn’t show up in any economic statistics. Once you take account of the growing numbers of poor young men in prison, you can see that black men obtained no real economic benefit at all from the economic expansion of the 1990s. This was a pretty surprising finding because there was a consensus that very strong economic growth could provide benefits to the furthest margins of the labor market.

What policy recommendations do you have for breaking the cycle of mass imprisonment?

We need to do at least two things. We need to re-examine our current approach to drug control policy. At the moment, incarceration is the presumptive sentence for drug offenders. I think we need to look at that and ask: Is this really the best way to spend our criminal justice dollars? Particularly in light of evidence that shows that many drug offenders really pose little risk of violent crime to the community. But changes in sentencing policy are not going to be enough. The fundamental problem is there is still no real functioning economy in poor urban neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. And as long as a shortage of jobs remains, as long as we have these very high rates of unemployment among young unskilled men, we’re still going to get very high rates of involvement of these young men in the criminal justice system. So I think ultimately we can’t avoid trying to solve the social problems that we’ve so far only tried to solve through criminal justice policy with social policy.

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