Mass Incarceration and Racist State Priorities At
Home and Abroad
by
Paul Street
Dissident Voice
March 11, 2003
* A slightly abbreviated
version of the following speech was delivered at The National Community
Building Network's 2003 Policy Conference, Creating a Connected Community:
Strategies for Overcoming Social and Economic Isolation, Seattle Washington,
February 27, 2003
I
want to thank the National Community Building Network for inviting me to share
and reflect on some of my findings on racially disparate mass incarceration and
related prisoner reentry issues.
One of the reasons that the
topic of the prison industrial complex elicits so much interest recently is
that s that it powerfully and simultaneously challenges two of contemporary
America's greatest self-deceiving ideological myths.
The first myth holds that
America has become a color-blind post-racist nation. I'll get to some of the
relevant facts on that in a few minutes. I should mention here that even John
McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute - an intellectual who has made a lucrative
career out of arguing that racism is essentially over in America - admits that
racial discrimination continues to be a huge problem in the nation's prison and
criminal justice systems.
The second myth is the
notion of the powerless and cash-strapped state. I'm talking about the idea
that government can't really do anything anymore; that it doesn't have the
strength, the legitimacy, the money, the wherewithal to carry out key
objectives. Tell that to the nation's mass of prisoners and ex-prisoners.
To break through the second
myth, you have to ask whose objectives American government can and supposedly
can't carry out. In the wealthiest nation on earth, the public sector lacks the
money to properly fund education for all of the country's children. It lacks
the resources to provide universal health coverage, leaving 42 million American
without basic medical insurance. It can't match unemployment benefits to the
numbers out of work. It lacks or claims to lack the money to provide meaningful
rehabilitation and reentry services for its many millions of very disproportionately
black prisoners and ex-prisoners, marked for life with a criminal record.
The list of unmet civic and
social needs goes on and on.
But listen to what our
public sector can pay for. It can afford to spend trillions on Tax Cuts
rewarding the top 1 percent in the thoroughly disingenuous name of
"economic stimulus." It can spend more on the military than on all of
its possible enemy states combined many times over, providing massive subsidy
to the high-tech corporate sector, including billions on weapons and
"defense" systems that bear no meaningful relations to any real
threat faced by the American people. It can afford to incapacitate and
incarcerate a greater share of its population than any nation in history and to
spend hundreds of millions each year on various forms of corporate welfare and
other routine public subsidies to "private" industry. It can afford
hundreds of billions and perhaps more than a trillion dollars for an invasion
and occupation of distant devastated nation that poses minimal risk to the US
and even to its own neighbors.
The American public sector
is weak and cash-strapped when it comes to social democracy for the people but
its cup runs over in powerful ways when it comes to meeting the needs of
wealth, racial disparity and empire.
I've been working on the
incarceration and reentry issues in Chicago for the last couple of years and
I've brought along a copy of a study I recently completed. It contains a lot of
the basic facts on racial and other dimensions of the incarceration and
ex-offender issue, with a special focus on the employment problems of
ex-offenders. Regarding Chicago and Illinois, I learned and reported that
Illinois' rising prison (IDOC) population (94 percent male) now stands
suggestively close to the number of households (predominately female-headed) in
the state receiving public family cash assistance. Just nine years ago the
number of prisoners in Illinois made up less than 15 percent number of the
state's welfare families. That's a remarkable transformation.
I learned that two thirds of
the prison population is African-American in a state that is only 15 percent
black. Nearly the same percentage comes from the Chicago metropolitan area,
something that will surprise nobody familiar with the highly segregated racial
demographics of the state. In 2001, the state's incarceration rate for
African-Americans was more than ten times the rate for whites
To house its rising number
of very disproportionately black and Chicago-based prisoners, I found, Illinois
built 20 adult prisons, an average of one per year, between 1980 and 2000. Mass
incarceration has emerged as one of the leading growth items in the state's
budget over the last sixteen (16) years, increasing from just over a third the
amount it spends on higher education to nearly three fourths.
In Illinois, it costs
$20,637 a year to house an adult prisoner and $50, 286 to incarcerate a
juvenile. The cost of incarcerating one adult is equal to more than four and a
half times the state's legally mandated public education "foundation
level" of $4,560 - the minimum expenditure determined to be required to
meet the educational needs of a single child.
One finding really knocked
me out. As of June 2001, I calculated, there were nearly 20,000 more black
males in the Illinois state prison system than the number of black males
enrolled in the state's public universities. There were more black males in the
state's correctional facilities just on drug charges than the total number of
black males enrolled as undergraduates in state universities. In addition, I
determined and reported that just 992 black males received a bachelors' degree
(3.3 percent of all conferred) from those universities in 1999. Seven thousand
black males were released from the Illinois state prison system the following
year just for drug offenses.
This provides some context
for understanding the different racial meanings attached to the phrase
"going downstate" for white and black youth in the Chicago area.
Beyond the shared favorable suggestion of a trip to the state basketball
tournament, the connotations are sharply (skin-) colorized. For many white
youths in and around Chicago, the phrase evokes the image of a trip with Mom
and Dad to begin academic careers at the prestigious University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign or one of the state's other many public universities. But for
younger Chicago-area Blacks, especially males (6 percent of the state's
prisoners are female), "going downstate" more commonly means a trip
under armed guard to take up residence at one of the state's numerous maximum
or medium-security prisons.
In 1996, I found out, the
respected international human rights organization Human Rights Watch reported,
"blacks constituted an astonishing 90 percent of all drug offenders
admitted to prison in Illinois." By 2000, the percentage had barely fallen
to 89 percent, making Illinois number two in the nation in terms of this key
disparity. The top one is Maryland - the other state that suspended the death
penalty because of racial and other forms of bias in murder convictions.
Turning to ex-offender
issues, I learned and reported that Illinois in 2001 was home to more than 400,000
ex-felons and nearly 120,000 ex-prisoners. Fifty three percent of those
ex-felons and 81 percent of those ex-prisoners were black. The difference
reflects the tendency of criminal justice authorities to give white
"offenders" and probation and black "offenders" prison.
Black male ex-prisoners, I
found, are equivalent in number to nearly one quarter (24 percent) of the black
male workforce in the Chicago area. Black male ex-felons are equivalent in
number to 42 percent of the black male workforce in the Chicago area. I
mentioned this statistic to a Chicago Tribune reporter writing about our
research last Fall and he didn't want to include it because of what it might do
to black workers.
The findings that seemed to
interest reporters most related to zip codes. I learned that ten very
predominantly black Chicago zip codes (including five on the city's West Side
and four on the South Side) received 25 percent of Illinois prisoners released
in the years 2000, 2001, and 2002. I determined that released prisoners are
returning to the same highly disadvantaged communities from which they came
prior to incarceration. The city's top 15 zip codes for prison releases are
very nearly (and in nearly the same exact order) identical to the top 15 zip
codes for prison population origin. The top 15 zip codes for prison releases
contain 10 of the city's top 15 zip codes for poverty, 11 of the top 15 zip
codes for unemployment, 10 of the lowest 15 zip codes for median income, and 10
of the lowest zip codes for possession of a high school degree. Each of the top
7 prison release zip codes lost jobs between 1991 and 2000 and 12 of the top 15
prison release zip codes had double-digit unemployment rates in 2000.
These numbers provided some
interesting context for a finding that initially surprised us in conducting
more the more than sixty interviews with ex-prisoners in the Chicago area - the
large number who referred to incarceration as an initially welcome "time
out" from the misery if life in their neighborhoods. It is common for to
demand that ex-offenders be given "a second chance" but the sorry
truth is that many if not most of them are returning home to communities where
they never received much in the way of a first chance.
Regarding labor market
consequences, I reported that ex-prisoners are returning to disadvantaged
communities with their already deep disadvantage deepened further. By the best
recent social-science estimates, incarceration carries a significant 10 to 20
percent "wage penalty." Ex-prisoners on average experience no real
wage increases in their twenties and thirties, when young men who have never
been incarcerated tend to experience rapid wage-growth. Prison time serves,
sociologist Devah Pager has noted, "to channel individuals away from skilled
occupations and into job sectors which are characterized by low wages, limited
job stability, and fewer opportunities for advancement. Overall, incarceration
appears to disrupt the career-building process such that prior work experience
contributes little to future opportunities. Ex-offenders are left to start back
at square one with respect to gaining a foothold in a particular
occupation."
Incarceration most
particularly closes off employment avenues for ex-offenders in the public
sector, Pager finds, thanks largely to rising prohibitions on government hiring
of people with drug convictions.
Employer bias, I learned, is
a big part of the reason for the wage-penalty on ex-offenders. More than 60
percent of employers report that they would not knowingly hire an ex-offender.
By comparison, 92 percent of those employers would likely hire a current or
former welfare recipient and 83 percent would hire someone who had been
unemployed for a year. It's the worst barrier. For many jobs, and not just
public sector jobs, however, employer preferences are irrelevant. Many
ex-offenders are banned or severely restricted from employment in a large
number of professions, job categories, and fields by professional licensing
statutes, rules, and practices that discriminate against potential employees
with felony records. According to a study conducted by the DePaul Law School in
2000, of the then ninety-eight occupations requiring state licensure in
Illinois, fifty-seven placed stipulations and/or restrictions for licensure on
applicants with a criminal record, including in some cases even misdemeanors.
These sorts of barriers
provide some context for a different finding in our ex-offenders interviews -
the large number of ex-prisoners who reported that their "real sentence"
began when they were released from the (not-so) "correctional"
facilities.
Interestingly enough, mass
incarceration is a prized source of labor market stability and economic
security in prison hosting Illinois towns. The prison construction boom - fed
by the rising "market" of black offenders - is an extraordinary
source of jobs, tax dollars, and associated local economic multipliers for
"downstate" Illinois communities. Using a very conservative estimate
that each prisoner is worth $25, 000 worth of local economic development each
year, I have guessed that mass incarceration transfer as much as a billion
dollars each year from the state's mostly Chicago-based black community to the
state's predominantly white and rural prison towns. Those towns and the
correctional unions that represent their prison workers (AFSCME Council 31 in
Illinois, which lobbied for the construction of the state's inhumane
"Supermax" facility in the town of Tamms) - three cheers for American
trade unionism! - have joined hands with prison-contracting corporations and
"law and order" politicians. Together they form a politically
powerful prison industrial complex that pushes incarceration as an economic
development program regardless of mass imprisonment's prison's impact on public
safety.
These sorts of numbers and
disparities are hardly unique to Illinois. Thanks to a 30-year campaign of
racially disparate surveillance, arrest, sentencing and incarceration carried
out under the auspices of the War on Drugs, things have reached the point where
no nation has ever imprisoned a higher percentage of its people than the
contemporary United States. The US is home to 6 percent of the world's people
and 25 percent of its prisoners.
The racial disparities are
incredible across the entire country. America is home to two million prisoners
and roughly half of them are black even though African-Americans make up less
than 13 percent of the nation's population. One in 10 of the world's prisoners
is an African-American male. According to the Justice Policy Institute there
are now more black men behind bars than in college in the United States of
America, "sweet land of liberty."
It's all pretty remarkable
when you consider that US policymakers are planning to invade and occupy
another sovereign nation in the name of "freedom." And when you
consider that most white Americans like to think of their society as now
essentially color-blind, as post-racist and that our policymakers like to refer
to the US as the world's greatest multiracial democracy.
Most, indeed 95 percent, of
America's prisoners return home. Since the great majority of the nation's
prisoners are released within a year, mass incarceration generates a massive
and ever rising population of ex-offenders. More than 600, 000 individuals are
released from state and federal prisons each year. That amounts to more than
1,600 a day, people saddled with what a cover story last summer in The
Economist called "The Stigma That Never Fades."
America's "steady
stream of individuals, branded by their criminal records," as Pager calls
them, is not limited to ex-prisoners. According to the best recent estimates,
roughly 13 million Americans - fully 7 percent of the adult population possess
felony records.
And an astonishing portion -
40 percent within three years of release - of the nation's army of ex-prisoners
cycles back to prison. The modern American mass incarceration state is fed by
the recycling of disadvantaged ex-offenders back into the prison system. Of the
more than 730,000 people entering prison or jail each year, 33% have been there
before.
The racial composition of
the ex-offender populations is striking. According to the latest social science
estimates from Christopher Uggen up at the University of Minnesota and Jeff
Maza at Northwestern, nearly one in five black men in the US has a prison
record and an "astounding" one in three black men now possess a felony
record.
Thanks to the negative labor
market consequences of having a felony record and a prison history, leading
academics are now describing racially disparate mass arrest and incarceration
as become a major factor in the creation of racial socioeconomic inequality in
the US. One such academic is Princeton sociologist Bruce Western.
"Although typically the preserve of criminology," Western notes,
"incarceration appears to shape aspects of inequality that are of
traditional interest to stratification researchers." The "usual list
of institutional influences on social stratification - schools, the families,
and social policy - should," he argues, "be expanded to consider the
coercive redistribution of life chances through incarceration." Among the
negative consequences, he adds, we should includes incarceration's artificial
suppression of the true black male unemployment rate, which would have stood at
39 percent in the mid-1990s if prisoners were factored in.
Incidentally, since blacks
have long been disproportionately reliant on government employment, the public
sector's special sensitivity to criminal records in hiring is particularly
deleterious in its impact on the African-American community.
In my experience, people are
amazed when they hear the prison release and ex-felon numbers. "Six
hundred thousand released prisoners a year? You can't be serious." This
reaction reflects ignorance about both the numbers going into prison in the
first place. More importantly, it reflects ignorance about the relatively short
terms that most convicts - especially the rising number of nonviolent drug
offenders - serve behind bars. It also reflects the fact prisoners typically
return to a relatively small number of heavily disadvantaged minority
neighborhoods, where they remain largely beyond the sphere of the mainstream
society's awareness and concern.
I mentioned the zip codes in
Chicago but you could do the same thing for most big states in the nation. For
example, just 3 percent of all the block groups in Cuyahoga County account for
20 percent of Ohio's prisoners and 96 percent of those block groups were found
in Cleveland.
Thanks to some writing I've
done nationally, I am identified to some extent with the idea that mass
incarceration is a form of Reverse Racial Reparations - a form of radical state
intervention that transfers wealth, census count and voting power away from the
black and into the white community. The chilling and living analogy to slavery
(including the infamous "three-fifths" compromise that permitted slave
states to count black chattel towards their Congressional representation) is
hard to miss, with the exception that black prisoners function much more as
capital (raw material) than they do as labor under the current regime.
The metaphor I prefer is
"the vicious circle." In Illinois, Chicago and the whole nation, mass
incarceration is a civil rights problem in and of itself. At the same time, it
also produces a significant and multi-dimensional "collateral"
damage, both reflecting and exacerbating the social, political, and economic
disenfranchisement of inner city black communities and deepening the inequality
of wealth and income between blacks and whites. In Chicago and Illinois as
throughout the nation, the decision and that's exactly what it is - a very
explicit policy decision - to criminalize and incarcerate the predominantly
black urban "underclass" at the expense of more positive, proactive,
and productive social expenditures and without appropriate concomitant
attention to rehabilitation and reentry creates problems larger than those it
set out to solve. It:
* perpetuates and deepens
the segregation, alienation, inequality, and exclusion that led many former
prisoners and ex-felons into "criminal" activity in the first place.
* deepens the labor market
difficulty and other forms of disadvantage experienced by hundreds of thousands
of minority men and women.
* piles new stigma on old,
saddling shocking numbers of young men and (increasingly) women, many convicted
minor and petty offenses, with the lifelong mark of a criminal record and the
often damaging experience of incarceration.
* removes real and potential
wages, purchasing power, economic development and political clout from the
black community to predominantly white prison communities and corporations.
* diverts attention and
resources away from confrontation with the deep underlying social problems that
create the context in which crime and mass incarceration emerge.
* privileges vengeance and
punishment above forgiveness and pragmatism in public policy.
* works against a number of
key policy goals of the larger society: public safety, stable family formation,
long-term labor market attachment, poverty reduction, equal opportunity, racial
integration and harmony, civic engagement, education, and balanced community
development.
Nearly 37 years ago, the
great civil rights leader and peace and social justice proponent Martin Luther
King and his fellow activists in the Southern Christian Leadership Council
(SCLC) came to Chicago and to other parts of the urban north and Midwest. He
was determined to challenge the complex social forces and institutions that
produced endemic poverty, misery, isolation, and powerlessness in the northern
black ghetto. The issues and institutions on which he focused - inferior and
segregated schools and housing, racial discrimination in the labor and real
estate markets and the public welfare bureaucracy, weakened family structures,
unattached and alienated youth, and racial imbalances in the electoral system -
are the same ones that have preoccupied scholars, activists and others
concerned with the persistently stark plight of inner city black communities
ever since.
Were he to miraculously return
today, King would be disappointed to see that these same forces and
institutions still reflect and feed stark patterns of black-white inequality,
segregation, and disproportionate black poverty in the Chicago area and the US
as a whole. He would also be struck by the dramatically elevated significance
of one particular institutional force in the perpetuation and deepening of that
poverty, inequality, and uneven development: the criminal justice system.
He would be passionately
concerned with the new regime of racially disparate mass incarceration that has
emerged under the auspices of the War on Drugs during the last 25-30 years. The
main policy problem faced by the victims of that regime, is definitely not
powerless government. It is rather the actions of an in fact powerful and
interventionist public sector that is being stripped of its positive and
pro-active social functions and geared increasingly towards regressive,
repressive, authoritarian and punitive behavior.
As George W. Bush prepares an
unjust, punitive, and criminal state-imperialist attack on Iraq, it is worth
recalling that he owes his presence at the seat of world power to the punitive
and criminally excessive electoral disenfranchisement of black ex-felons both
real and suspected in the state of Florida. It is worth recalling that Bush is
reputed to have benefited from the expungement of a felony drug conviction from
his record. And it is also worth reflecting that a number of soldiers serving
in his armed forces were given the option of joining the military as their only
alternative to incarceration.
On a positive note, the
majority of American people join with those in Europe and other parts of the
world oppose his plans to needlessly put those soldiers in harms way without
multilateral and United Nations approval. In a similar vein, we now have some
very interesting survey data from Peter Hart Associates and other leading
pollsters showing that most Americans would like their policymakers to move
away from punitive, racially disparate mass incarceration and towards
pro-active treatment, rehabilitation and community-based justice and real
"corrections." This too is in line with European and world opinion.
The dark cloud around
criminal justice issues at home is starting I think to fade a little and I look
forward to working with all of you both in de-incarcerating this nation and in
stopping Mad King George from blowing up the world.
Paul Street is the author of “Color Bind," a
chapter in Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor (Routledge
Press, 2003), edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright. Email: pstreet@cul-chicago.org