Social inequality in prisons

Becky Pettit's latest paper strengthens a point she's made in the past about imprisonment's impact on black and Latino populations from disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Pettit says we are creating an outcast group that sustains itself from generation to generation. We could fix that and lower the crime rate by improving the life prospects of disadvantaged people. At a time when dollars are short, we need to be reminded what spending gets us the most for our money.

Washington is already doing some things right. The Department of Corrections, for instance, has education programs and skills training as part of its core goals. We need to stand behind that work.

And when we are talking about improving K-12 education for all students, we should think of that as part of our public-safety policy.

Pettit is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington and her paper is part of an issue of Daedalus, a magazine of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The summer issue is dedicated to issues of imprisonment and inequality.

In the paper co-authored by Harvard professor Bruce Western, Pettit focuses on three characteristics of the social inequality created by mass incarceration:

It is invisible to most people, cumulative in its effect, and intergenerational.

Pettit told me that over the past 30 years increasing imprisonment has had less to do with criminality than it has to do with race and class.

Of African-American men born since the mid-1970s and who dropped out of school, 68 percent have prison records.

For most of the 20th century the U.S. imprisonment rate stayed about the same from year to year, but it began to soar in the early 1980s with tough-on-crime policies and especially the war on drugs.

That war has destabilized poor, minority families and communities across country.

And it disguises the depth of inequality. Pettit uses employment rates as an example.

The way we figure unemployment doesn't take into account people from a community who are in prison. In 2008, about 40 percent of black dropouts were unemployed. But add men behind bars and the figure is 75 percent.

And what about people who have done time and have dropped out of the job market because their prospects are so low? The cumulative effect of all that imprisonment is a whole lot of people who have an even harder time becoming part of the broader society.

And people often come out of prison with habits and behaviors that further damage their prospects.

Then there is the intergenerational effect. Most prisoners have children under 18.

The report says, "New research also shows that the children of incarcerated parents, particularly the boys, are at greater risk of developmental delays and behavioral problems." No surprise there.

So, from all that imprisonment we get a distorted picture of inequality. We get people who come out worse than when they went in, and we get a potential new generation of prisoners.

The current system reduces crime, but only by a small amount because those criminals are off the street, says Pettit and others. That's a pretty poor return for $70 billion a year, Pettit says.

There are cheaper, more effective ways to reduce crime. Help kids get a diploma to start.

Early-childhood education programs show striking results in reducing delinquency and crime.

Jobs programs for people coming out of prison reduce recidivism.

The current system makes things worse. The authors go so far as to say it is an institution of social stratification rather than crime control.

And they are not the only ones saying that.

If we truly care about community, family, safety, and seeing that tax dollars are spent wisely, we should spend efficiently on bridging gaps, not deepening them.

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