#bruce western

[ammg-old]

The blacks incarcerated in this country are not like the majority of Americans. They do not merely hail from poor communities—they hail from communities that have been imperiled across both the deep and immediate past, and continue to be imperiled today. Peril is generational for black people in America—and incarceration is our current mechanism for ensuring that the peril continues. Incarceration pushes you out of the job market. Incarceration disqualifies you from feeding your family with food stamps. Incarceration allows for housing discrimination based on a criminal-background check. Incarceration increases your risk of homelessness. Incarceration increases your chances of being incarcerated again.

“The prison boom helps us understand how racial inequality in America was sustained, despite great optimism for the social progress of African Americans,” Bruce Western, the Harvard sociologist, writes. “The prison boom is not the main cause of inequality between blacks and whites in America, but it did foreclose upward mobility and deflate hopes for racial equality.”

– The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

[globalprisonpol]

Like other welfare institutions, the prison was conceived to rescue the citizenship of the unfortunate, the poor, and the deviant.

-Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America

In the introduction to his book, Bruce Western discusses the origins of the prison system in America as a tool of moral rehabilitation. Prisons were places for offenders to become morally correct and ultimately re-enter society as reformed citizens. He goes on to explain that in the 1960s American politicians adapted a "tough on crime" stance that hooked working-class whites who were unnerved by the civil rights movement. The prison system has therefore always targeted the marginalized to appease the least "deviant," whether it be racially or behaviorally. It's not much different now, as evidenced in part by the high percentage of people imprisoned for drug-related offenses: 55% of federal prisoners are serving time for drug offenses versus the 13% serving for violence offenses (found here). There's also the racial disparity that supports some peoples' views that imprisonment is a tool of racialized social control. As one illustration of racial disparity: "5 times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites" (found here). There is clearly inequality and racism at play in the American prison system that aims to, as Bruce Western writes, "rescue" the privileged population of those perceived deviant.