Mass Incarceration and Race

Abstract

Concurrent with the War on Drugs, the proportion of Americans under correctional control skyrocketed. This increase was out of proportion to what was once a rising crime rate, and it continued even after crime declined. At all levels of correctional control, non-whites were disproportionately impacted, facing greater odds of arrest, greater odds of conviction, longer sentences, and greater odds of reentry due to a parole violation. This disproportionate impact holds true even when individuals of the same economic and educational background are compared. As a result, deep racial disparities exist in Americans' experiences with the correctional system.

Overview

While the overall rate of incarceration rose from 1970 to the end of the twentieth century, mass incarceration most deeply impacted African Americans and other minorities, and the increase in the incarceration rate of non-whites was not matched by an equal increase in crime rates; in fact, it continued to climb even as crime rates declined to 1970 levels. Among African Americans, 2,300 people per 100,000 are inmates, and 3 percent of African American men will serve time in prison at some point in their life; among whites, the figure is only 400 per 100,000, or less than one-fifth the proportion (Gottschalk, 2015). Drug use is roughly the same for all races, but whites are far less likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and if arrested, far less likely to be sentenced to incarceration.

The link between mass incarceration and race at times is so strong that some writers see the phenomenon of mass incarceration as synonymous with the racial disparity of incarceration. Non-whites, particularly African Americans, have been disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration and disproportionately targeted by the policies that have led to it, most notably the War on Drugs. In "Race, Wealth and Incarceration: Results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth," published in 2016, Darrick Hamilton, Khaing Zaw, and William Darity found that race was a significantly more reliable predictor of incarceration than wealth: even African Americans who grew up wealthy were much more likely to be sent to prison than poor whites (Ehrenfreund, 2016). Only in the highest decile of wealth does this cease to be true. African Americans in the 7th decile of wealth, for example, were three times more likely to go to prison before they turned 29 than whites of equal wealth, and at least twice as likely as whites of any wealth decile. Such studies strongly suggest that differences so vast cannot be flukes. It is only reasonable to conclude that either the number of non-whites incarcerated for crimes is disproportionately high, or the number of whites incarcerated is disproportionately low.

Further Insights

A key to understanding mass incarceration and race is to better understand racism. Too often people imagine racism to consist simply of an individual's personal animosity toward members of a specific race, or toward all people not of the individual's race. Absent sufficient numbers of such individuals who clearly hold such animosity, it is difficult to imagine how racism, in a generalized sense, would then exist. This, however, is not the way social scientists, activists, and scholars of race relations understand racism. Personal animosity can be a factor in racism, but even broader constructions of racism fail to properly explain it, if their emphasis is on the conscious hostility of the individual toward members of a race.

The United States was founded at a time when racism pervaded virtually all human activity and was foundational to the American economy and social structure. The institution of slavery was enshrined in the Constitution and citizenship was initially extended only to white men. While equal rights under the law were eventually granted to all Americans, progress was resisted at every turn—not just by reactionary belligerents in the citizenry but by the establishment of American society and government. At regular intervals, when new benefits were created for American citizens, efforts were made to deny them to non-whites. The first substantial immigration laws were all grounded in beliefs about which races and nationalities should be allowed to enter the United States, and in what numbers; the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, which made great leaps towards strengthening the white middle class and protecting poor white Americans from the impacts of poverty, were crafted so as to limit African Americans' access to the same benefits; even many of the suffragists who fought for women's right to vote did not support extending the vote to African Americans.

These denials of full tangible and intangible benefits to African Americans are an element of what is known as systemic racism: the contributions of American institutions, traditions, and practices to a white supremacist environment, which encompasses individual racism, structural racism, and institutional racism. Structural racism consists of the set of dynamics in a culture that normalize preferential treatment for whites. Institutional racism is a closely related concept but refers to the racist and discriminatory outcomes created by specific political and social institutions, including the education system, the prison system, health care, the housing sector, and the banking industry.

Systemic racism helps to explain the broader background of why there is a disproportionately high number of non-white people in correctional control. The other side of the coin is the concept of privilege, especially (but not exclusively) white privilege. In this context, privilege refers to the set of unearned benefits which are bestowed on members of a specific social group—generally meaning a dominant, non-marginalized group. One element of systemic racism is the treatment of whites as the default model of American identity, with all other types of Americans as exceptions to that rule. History and society create the expectation that a president or other politician is to be a white man, to the extent that being a female governor or senator is notable, as is being an African American president. As true as this holds for politicians in the twenty-first century, it used to be just as true for doctors, lawyers, or even white-collar workers in general. White male privilege includes the privilege of not standing out or being treated as different because of your gender or race.

Being privileged is the opposite of being marginalized. Most television shows and movies, especially those into which studios sink the most money, are made with white audiences in mind, and women are expected to be more willing to watch male protagonists than men are to watch female protagonists. Privilege, however, goes much deeper than entertainment and popular culture. White privilege means that whatever course life takes, it would be more difficult without that privilege. Without the benefit of white privilege, for example, an individual is less likely to attend a well-funded school, less likely to be accepted to college, less likely to be offered a job or a loan, and more likely to be arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. This privilege exists in addition to the specific economic or educational factors with which it is correlated. For example, because juries are more likely to be predominantly white, a white person is more likely to be tried by a jury of their racial peers than a non-white person is, which influences the odds of their conviction and sentencing independently of factors such as education and income.

Issues

Though the War on Drugs was initiated by a Republican administration (Nixon's), it received bipartisan support from subsequent administrations, and President Clinton was the first to make the "drug czar" a Cabinet-level position. This focus on drug crimes originated in part to provide cover to efforts to target African American neighborhoods in policing efforts, a fact later confirmed by former Nixon officials. The implementation of this new priority on criminalizing drug use always disproportionately influenced African Americans.

Even before the 1990s, policing practices emphasized corner drug dealers and poor African-American neighborhoods. Disparity in sentencing guidelines for crack, whose users and dealers at the time were predominantly African American, and cocaine, a more expensive drug preferred by whites, revealed a fundamental difference in how equivalent crimes were perceived depending on the race of the perpetrator. The majority of illegal drug users are, in fact, white, as are the majority of their dealers; the average drug user purchases drugs from people in or adjacent to their social circle, such as classmates, friends, or co-workers, and the majority of drug sales are conducted not on street corners but in private homes, schools, and workplaces.

The motives for targeting African American drug use seem to be multivalent. Street corner drug dealers are the most visible; thus, even if they represent a minority of drug sales, policing them reinforces the desired public image of law enforcement. African American corner drug dealers, critics contend, are also less likely to cause social or political problems for the arresting officers and their supervisors than more affluent and white purveyors of the cocaine trade at, for example, a private school.

Though people are incarcerated for a variety of crimes, the emphasis on drug crimes is the single factor most responsible for the late twentieth century spike in prison populations; by extension, because drug laws and drug policing disproportionately impacted African American communities, so did mass incarceration. For similar reasons, other minorities were also disproportionately impacted; in parts of the country with large Latino populations, policing efforts centered on those neighborhoods over white ones, while in parts of the country with large Native American populations, the same held true.

Incarceration was also used as a political tool to quell dissent. The Nixon administration used the War on Drugs in order to focus on two groups that threatened it: African American activists and "hippies." The image of the returning Vietnam veteran, coming home from war with a drug addiction, was used to alarm the public and drum up support for stricter laws; the specter of "crack babies" would be used to similar effect a decade later, again underscoring the idea that crack, which at the time was most associated with African American usage, was somehow a deadlier and more devious drug than powder cocaine, even though the two drugs are derived from the same narcotic and simply consumed in different ways.

The incarcerations resulting from the War on Drugs followed closely on the heels of the "race riots" that resulted in widespread arrests during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Oliver, 2008). Scholar Michelle Alexander, in her award-winning The New Jim Crow, describes the criminal justice trends of the second half of the twentieth century as motivated by the same concerns as the Jim Crow era: a desire to create systems of control to regulate African Americans in a post-slavery nation, to prevent them from accessing privilege and power, and to create strict guides for their behavior (Alexander, 2010).

Terms & Concepts

Corrections: "Corrections" is the common term for the system of government institutions that deal with carrying out the sentences of individuals convicted of crimes; individuals who are incarcerated, supervised (under probation or parole), or confined by court order to a treatment center are said to be under correctional control. The term "corrections" or "correctional" became preferred over "penal" in the 1970s, because of a drive for more rehabilitative efforts in the system, rather than strictly meting out punishment.

Incarceration: Incarceration is the judicially ordered confinement of a convicted criminal as punishment for a crime.

Jail: Lacking many of the resources necessary for long-term supervision, a jail is a penal facility intended for short-term stays, such as for defendants awaiting trial, inmates awaiting transfer to a prison, or inmates serving short sentences.

Parole: Parole is a state of supervision and specific conditions that many prisoners enter into upon release, either because of an early release or because the state has imposed mandatory parole, which applies even after the serving of a full sentence; supervising ex-prisoners under parole is a cheaper way of retaining correctional control than keeping them in prison where their upkeep is the responsibility of the state.

Prison: While jails are usually administered by local authorities, prisons are administered by state- or federal-level agencies, or by private companies working on their behalf, and they are designed for long-term stays, usually with multiple levels of security for different classes of inmate.

Privilege: A set of unearned benefits bestowed on members of a specific non-marginalized social group.

Probation: Like parole, probation encompasses a set of behavioral restrictions applied to a criminal offender, enforced with the threat of incarceration.

Bibliography

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Pettit, B. (2012). Invisible: Mass incarceration and the myth of black progress. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

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Suggested Reading

Buck, P. D. (2017). The strange birth and continuing life of the US as a slaving republic: Race, unfree labor and the state. Anthropological Theory, 17(2), 159–191. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=123782790&site=ehost-live

Clear, T. R. (2009). Imprisoning communities: How mass incarceration makes disadvantaged neighborhoods worse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Drucker, E. (2013). A plague of prisons: The epidemiology of mass incarceration in America. New York, NY: The New Press.

Jay, M., & Conklin, P. (2017). Detroit and the political origins of 'broken windows' policing. Race & Class, 59(2), 26–48. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=125597789&site=ehost-live

Jones, E. (2018). Racism, fines and fees and the US carceral state. Race & Class, 59(3), 38–50. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=127118231&site=ehost-live

Rios, V. M., Carney, N., & Kelekay, J. (2017). Ethnographies of race, crime, and justice: Toward a sociological double-consciousness. Annual Review of Sociology, 434, 93–513. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=124395476&site=ehost-live

Stevenson, B. (2015). Just mercy. New York, NY: Spiegel and Grau.