Prison's influence widespread

Walk around in the dark and you're likely to stub your toe.

That's the message at the core of Becky Pettit's latest work, in which she says we've crafted an enormous social-engineering program without knowing it, let alone understanding its effects.

Pettit, a University of Washington sociologist, is talking about the implications of imprisonment.

I spoke with Pettit before she presented her study to the American Sociological Association at its annual meeting over the weekend.

She said incarceration has significant impact on society, especially on low-skill and minority communities. But most studies look at prisoners and the rest of us separately.

Imprisonment was not such a big factor 30 years ago, but it is now.

The prison population quadrupled between 1980 and 2005. About 2.4 million are now in prisons or jails — more than 1 in 100 Americans. A ratio that significant is bound to affect other policies, but we almost never take it into account.

Mortality rates, birth rates, rates of single-parent households are all affected by imprisonment. We can't understand those issues without taking imprisonment into account.

By ignoring the prison population, we hamper our ability to make good decisions about health, racial and class inequalities, even population-migration patterns.

One of the curious things Pettit found was that some small towns show a sizable minority population, though you wouldn't notice it walking down Main Street.

That's because so many prisons are located in rural areas, and small-town jails sometimes take their overflow. So if you are crafting policies you might base them on undercounts in urban areas and overcounts in rural ones.

There are high rates of tuberculosis and HIV in prison populations. Where do people take those diseases when they get out? The way we collect data now, it would be nearly impossible to know.

Heck, if I lived in a place that was accepting prisoners, I'd be worried about the diseases they bring to town.

Crime has consequences for the criminal. How we deal with it has broader consequences. We need to look more closely at that.

What's clear to Pettit is that the government is mucking with the lives of disadvantaged American families in a big way.

In an earlier study, Pettit found that "60 percent of black men without a high-school diploma can expect to spend time in a state or federal prison."

Couple that with statistics that show that by the end of the 1990s, more than 60 percent of black children were living with only one parent.

And we know how children from low-income single-parent households fare in school.

Have we created a loop that perpetuates itself?

Policy choices, more than increases in crime, drove up imprisonment rates over the past 15 years, Pettit said. We decided to lock up more people for victimless crimes, for one. We can make different choices.

Pettit and her associate, UW researcher Bryan Sykes, are ringing an alarm bell.

We need to wake up, turn on the lights, and look where we're going.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.