REENTRY REVERSING MASS IMPRISONMENT

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the
"basic human equality associated with full membership in a
community." By this measure, thirty years of prison growth
concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American
citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the
conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to
consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last
year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic
Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the
hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, "With the
world's largest prison population," he said, "our prisons test the
limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral
identity." Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political
compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep
inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil
the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political
climate, Webb inquired into the prison's significance, not just for
crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has
not burst yet, but Webb's hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw
in tough-on-crime politics.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a
fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the
fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of
imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has
hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as
much a story about race and class as it is about crime control.
Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like
involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times
more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial
disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of
education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison
or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison
than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor's
degree. The large black-white disparity in incarceration is unmatched
by most other social indicators. Racial disparities in unemployment
(two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant
mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) are all
significantly lower than the seven to one black-white ratio in
incarceration rates.

Though lurid portrayals of black criminality are easy to find on the
local news or reality TV, the deep class divisions in imprisonment
may be less apparent. Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since
1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high
school education. Among young black men who have never been to
college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to
prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school
failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education
ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go
to prison before age thirty-five. The stigma of official criminality
has become normal for these poorly educated black men, and they are
thereby converted from merely disadvantaged into a class of social
outsiders. These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need
only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a
common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.

The effects of the prison are not confined within its walls. Those
coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face an
narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban
neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are
often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little and offer only a
fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially
valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in
poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic
disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most
of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities
in incarceration. In many cases people with felony records are denied
housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states they are
permanently denied the right to vote.

The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families.
Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children
as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married.
Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The
family instability surrounding incarceration persists across
generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and
25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison
by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent
drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional
facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on
visiting day. In short those with prison records and their families
are something less than full members of society. To be young, black,
and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and
a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom
has produced mass incarceration-a level of imprisonment so vast and
concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire
social group.

Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even
greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s,
immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the
civil rights movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in
the experience of African-Americans in poor neighborhoods, the
advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection
from discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration
undermined the project for full African-American citizenship and
revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute
social disparity.

Skeptics may concede that mass incarceration injured social justice,
but surely, they would contend, it contributed to the tremendous
decline in crime through the 1990s. Indeed, the crime decline of the
'90s produced a great improvement in public safety. From 1993 to
2001, the violent crime rate fell considerably, murder rates in big
cities like New York and Los Angeles dropped by half or more, and
this progress in social wellbeing was recorded by rich and poor
alike. Yet, when I analyzed crime rates in this period, I found that
rising prison populations did not reduce crime by much. The growth in
state imprisonment accounted for 2-5 percent of the decline in
serious crime-one-tenth of the crime drop from 1993 to 2001. The
remaining nine-tenths was due to factors like the increasing size of
local police forces, the pacification of the drug trade following the
crack epidemic of the early 1990s, and the role of local
circumstances that resist a general explanation.

So a modest decline in serious crime over an eight year period was
purchased for $53 billion in additional correctional spending and
half a million new prison inmates: a large price to pay for a small
reduction. If we add the lost earnings of prisoners to the family
disruption and community instability produced by mass incarceration,
we cannot but acknowledge that a steep price was paid for a small
improvement in public safety. Several examples further demonstrate
that the boom may have been a waste because crime can be controlled
without large increases in imprisonment. Violent crime in Canada, for
example, also declined greatly through the 1990s, but Canadian
incarceration rates actually fell from 1991 to 1999. New York
maintained particularly low crime rates through the 2000s, but has
been one of the few states to cut its prison population in recent years.

More importantly, perhaps, the reduction in crime was accompanied by
an array of new problems associated with mass incarceration. Those
states that have sought reduced crime through mass incarceration find
themselves faced with an array of problems associated with
overreliance on imprisonment. How can poor communities with few
resources absorb the return of 700,000 prisoners each year? How can
states pay for their prisons while responding to the competing
demands of higher education, Medicaid, and K-12 schools? How can we
address the social costs-the broken homes, unemployment, and
crime-that can follow from imprisonment? Questions such as these lead
us to a more fundamental concern: how can mass imprisonment be
reversed and American citizenship repaired?

We can begin to tackle these issues by understanding how we got here.
The origins of today's mass incarceration can be traced to basic
political and economic shifts in the 1960s. On the economic side, the
prison population swelled following the collapse of the urban
manufacturing industry and subsequent cascade of social ills that
swept poor inner-city neighborhoods. Serious crime-the traditional
target of the penal system-was an important part of these urban
social problems. Murder rates in large cities grew dramatically from
1965 to 1980. But in addition to the problem of serious crime, the
penal system was used to manage many of the byproducts of persistent
poverty: untreated drug addiction and mental illness, homelessness,
chronic idleness among young men, and social disorder. It was the
management of these social problems, not serious crime, that fuelled
incarceration rates for drug users, public-order offenders, and
parole violators.

As the social crisis of urban America supplied the masses for mass
incarceration, the penal system itself became more punitive. The
tough-on-crime message honed by the Republican Party in national
politics since the Goldwater campaign of 1964 spoke to the racial
anxieties of white voters discomfited by civil rights protests and
summertime waves of civil unrest felt in cities through the decade.
Conservatives charged that liberals coddled criminals and excused
crime with phony root causes like poverty and unemployment. President
Nixon launched a war on crime, only to be surpassed by President
Reagan's War on Drugs, which applied the resources of federal law
enforcement to the problem of drug control. Policy experts abandoned
rehabilitation, concluding that prisons could only deter and
warehouse those who would otherwise commit crime in society. These
politics produced a revolution in criminal sentencing. Mandatory
minimum prison sentences, sentencing guidelines, parole abolition,
and life sentences for third-time felons were widely adopted through
the 1980s. The no-nonsense, tough-on-crime politics reached a
bipartisan apotheosis with President Clinton's 1994 crime bill, which
launched the largest prison construction project in the nation's
history. As a result of these changes, prison time-as opposed to
community supervision-became the main criminal sanction for felony offenders.

The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted
in three fallacies of the tough-on-crime perspective. First, there is
the fallacy of us and them. For tough-on-crime advocates, the
innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals,
and the prison works to separate us from them. The truth is that the
criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons.
Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioral
staples of male youth. Most of the crime they commit is perpetrated
on each other. This is reflected most tragically in the high rates of
homicide victimization among males under age twenty-five, black males
in particular. Some young men do become more seriously and
persistently involved in crime, but neither the criminal-justice
system nor criminologists can predict who those serious offenders
will be or when they will stop offending. Thus the power to police
and punish cannot separate us from criminals with great distinction,
but instead flows along the contours of social inequality. Visible
markers like age, skin color, and neighborhood become rough proxies
for criminal threat. Small race and class differences in offending
are amplified at each stage of criminal processing from arrest
through conviction and sentencing. As a result the prison walls we
built with such industry in the 1980s and '90s did not keep out the
criminal predators, but instead divided us internally, leaving our
poorest communities with fewer opportunities to join the mainstream
and deeply skeptical of the institutions charged with their safety.

Second, there is the fallacy of personal defect. Tough-on-crime
politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not
to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals.
Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender
lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less
human than the rest of us. The diagnosis of defective character
points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative
efforts and justifying the mission of semi-permanent incapacitation.
The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled
association of crime with race in political talk. But seeking
criminality in defects of character, the architects of the prison
boom ignored the great rise in urban youth unemployment that preceded
the growth in murder rates in the 1960s and '70s. They ignored the
illegal drug trade, which flourished to fill the vacuum of legitimate
economic opportunity left by urban deindustrialization. They ignored,
too, the fact that jobs are not just a source of economic opportunity
but of social control that routinizes daily life and draws young men
into a wide array of socially beneficial roles. Lastly, they ignored
the bonds of mutual assistance that are only weakly sustained by
communities of concentrated poverty. Thus young men would return home
from prison only to easily surmount once again the same stunted
social barriers to crime that contributed to their imprisonment in
the first place.

The final fallacy of the tough-on-crime perspective is the myth of
the free market. The free market fallacy sees the welfare state as
pampering the criminal class and building expectations of something
for nothing. Anti-poverty programs were trimmed throughout the 1970s
and '80s, and poor young men largely fell through the diminished
safety net that remained. For free marketeers, the question was
simply whether or not to spend public money on the poor-they did not
anticipate that idle young men present a social problem. Without
school, work, or military service, these poor young men were left on
the street-corner, sometimes acting disorderly and often fuelling
fears of crime. We may have skimped on welfare, but we paid anyway,
splurging on police and prisons. Because incarceration was so highly
concentrated in particular neighborhoods and areas within them,
certain city blocks received millions of dollars in "correctional
investment"-spending on the removal of local residents by
incarceration. These million-dollar blocks reveal a question falsely
posed. We never faced a choice of whether to spend money on the poor;
the dollars diverted from education and employment found their way to
prison construction. Our political choice, it turned out, was not how
much we spent on the poor, but what to spend it on.

Getting tough on crime created a sustained public policy mistake of
immense proportions. If the prison boom was indeed produced by a
historic collision between the jobless ghetto and a punitive politics
of civil rights backlash, retreating from mass incarceration will
involve equally fundamental shifts in politics and economics. What
would a new politics of criminal justice look like, and what policies
would it promote?

There are small signs of change in the public conversation about
crime, punishment, and poverty, though bold ideas have not yet
penetrated the mainstream. By supporting education and treatment
programs for prisoners, leaders from both parties have offered one
answer to Senator Webb's question about the future of punishment in
America. In April this year, President Bush signed the Second Chance
Act, which funds literacy programs, drug treatment, and other
services for prisoners and ex-prisoners. While prison reform
advocates supported Second Chance, a bipartisan majority was ensured
by Christian conservatives like Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who
spoke up for a law that promoted a message of redemption and
faith-based prison programs.

Second Chance can be viewed as one achievement in a broader movement
for improved prisoner reentry policy. Jeremy Travis, president of
John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has been a leading
voice in naming the social problem of prisoner reentry and proposing
policy solutions. In his 2005 book But They All Come Back Travis
writes: "The reality of mass incarceration translates into the
reality of reentry . . . [T]he harmful effects of high rates of
incarceration and reentry call for . . . policies that promote
reintegration, not retribution." Here the reentry movement challenges
mass incarceration by reasserting the importance of rehabilitation,
but deliberately stops short of recommending a reduction in prison populations.

If the employment problems of young minority men in poor urban
neighborhoods are a prime precondition for mass incarceration,
prisoner reentry programs that promote employment may offer a way out
of the street-prison cycle in which so many are caught. A wide
variety of programs aim to help people move from prison to the labor
market. GED classes, vocational training, prison work-programs, and
job readiness instruction all seek to improve prisoners' preparation
for working life. In part, the wide variety of programs reflects the
sheer range of behavioral and cognitive deficits of the prison population.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for these programs is that many men
and women coming out of prison-most in their thirties or older-have
never held a steady job. The newly released behave awkwardly around
coworkers and have never cultivated daily work habits; these
shortcomings may be no less debilitating than illiteracy or a
shortage of vocational skills. Social scientists refer to the
necessary traits of reliability, motivation, and sociability as
"non-cognitive skills." While education programs in prison can help
develop the cognitive skills of math and verbal ability, the
non-cognitive skills that promote success in free society are hard to
develop while incarcerated. To learn these skills, people coming out
of prison must repeatedly rehearse the habits of regular work. But
precisely because they have so little work experience and carry the
added penalty of a criminal record, formerly incarcerated men and
women have little access to the steady jobs that can make them more
productive. For ex-prisoners, extreme economic insecurity is a trap
that prevents them accumulating the kind of work experience that
enables a return to mainstream social life.

Building everyday work habits means working every day; instead of
relying only on a wary labor market, some programs try to break the
cycle of economic insecurity by offering jobs immediately after
release from prison. The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) in
New York provides transitional jobs in combination with job placement
services to move prisoners into the open labor market. CEO takes
people straight out of prison, and puts them in a week-long training
program before assigning them to a seven-hour day, four-day week in
small supervised crews doing groundskeeping and other manual work at
the New York minimum wage of $7.15 an hour. On the fifth day of each
week, the CEO participants take vocational and job readiness classes
that prepare them for job searching and interviews. CEO's
transitional jobs generally last a month or two and program graduates
receive transport and supermarket vouchers if they remain employed.

CEO, in a move rare among reentry programs, has sought to study the
effectiveness of its program through experimentation. The experiment
randomly assigned parolees either to transitional jobs or to a
control group composed of former inmates who received job-search
assistance from the support staff, but not transitional work.
Parolees who took on transitional jobs within three months of release
from prison saw their arrest rates reduced by about 20 percent
compared to the control group. However, parolees who entered the
transitional jobs more than 3 months after prison release experience
no reductions in recidivism. It seems that timely intervention,
immediately after prison, provides the greatest benefits.

CEO's method shows promising results, but is narrowly directed toward
alleviating unemployment. A small but intensive program run by the
Brooklyn District Attorney suggests how a more comprehensive program
might operate. Charles "Joe" Hynes is unusual among prosecutors. He
actively incorporates alternatives to incarceration into the work of
his office. Beginning in 1990 Hynes promoted a diversion program that
sent nonviolent drug offenders to substance abuse treatment instead
of prison. By the later part of the decade, the D.A. was convening
regular meetings of community groups throughout Brooklyn to connect
parolees and probationers to drug treatment, housing, and jobs.

The meetings were run by Hynes's energetic First Assistant District
Attorney, Patricia Gatling. Gatling did not see the D.A.'s role as
simply seeking the toughest justice for Brooklyn's criminal
defendants. In her view, the D.A. is a community lawyer, charged with
strengthening neighborhoods and improving public safety in a broad
sense. The community meetings in Brooklyn's poor neighborhoods were
Gatling's effort to replenish the area's flagging social capital-the
web of networks and supports that greases the wheels of social life.
After a few years, Hynes hired a full-time social worker and
developed his own prisoner reentry program. At first it operated only
in a few precincts with high parole caseloads, but later it spread
across the whole borough.

Called ComALERT (Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together),
the program provides parolees with drug treatment, transitional
employment, and housing. Most ComALERT participants, have prior
convictions for drugs or violence, and all have been ordered into
drug treatment. Some homeless parolees enter the Ready Willing and
Able (RWA) program that provides a full year of employment and
supportive housing in return for a promise of complete drug and
alcohol abstinence and a biweekly regime of drug testing. RWA
participants work in street cleaning and other unskilled jobs for
$7.50 an hour, share small apartments, and receive drug counseling
and educational programming. A recent evaluation found that two years
after release from prison, ComALERT clients were 18 percent less
likely to be rearrested than a comparison group with a similar
history of crime and drug use. ComALERT participants also earned
about $1000 more each quarter and were about 20 percent more likely
to be employed.

These positive outcomes suggest three policy lessons. First,
transitional jobs are large-dose interventions that can reduce
recidivism at least for a while by providing close supervision and
paying wages. Regular work habits cannot be built cheap, though these
programs are still less expensive than incarceration. Second, the
programs that work best are comprehensive, bundling together a
variety of services including drug treatment and housing. Because
released prisoners often cope with a range of problems, additional
supports must be in place for transitional jobs to help. Third,
timely intervention is imperative; successful schemes provide a job
immediately out of prison.

While the results from transitional jobs and supplementary programs
are encouraging, we must be realistic about what these projects can
achieve. Most initiatives operate at the local level. Sometimes their
efforts span a city, but more often several neighborhoods. The high
quality results that stem from local efforts will not scale to
counties and states. Even in the best-case scenario, if recidivism is
reduced by 10 or 20 percent, ex-prisoners would still be re-arrested
at rates of around 40 percent or more.

Still, a large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those
coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring
citizenship to America's new carceral class. Instead of focusing
assessment of reentry programs narrowly on the decrease in recidivism
achieved, we should account for the benefits of families reunited,
the paychecks that help support the children of ex-prisoners, and the
value of literacy for its effects on quality of life in addition to
its role in averting crime. The cost-benefit calculus looks quite
different when we include these social goods. For nonviolent drug and
public-order offenders, intensive, large-dose treatment in the
community (which is relatively cheap) begins to look like a good
alternative to custody in prison (which is expensive). Here we count
as benefits not just reductions in crime, which may be modest, but
all the ways in which social life is made more normal by drawing our
erstwhile outsiders back into society, instead of building more walls
to keep them out.

What would a different kind of penal system look like: one that
viewed the unemployment of ex-prisoners as a key problem to solve and
the deficit of noncognitive skills a central obstacle to steady work?
Projecting our exemplary local programs on to the national stage, all
parolees leaving prison in need of a job would move into closely
supervised community-service work paying minimum wage. Like
Brooklyn's RWA program, these jobs might be offered for up to a year
and coupled to job placement with the goal of parolee
self-sufficiency. Those with drug problems would enroll in a rigorous
program of treatment and testing. Those living on the streets would
move into supportive housing.

How many would participate in this national reentry program, and at
what cost? Employment statistics for prisoners suggest a national
transitional jobs program would enroll about 180,000 out of the
700,000 prisoners released each year. Around 200,000 would fill new
places in drug treatment programs. Another 100,000 would require
housing. A national program of transitional jobs, drug treatment, and
supportive housing would represent a significant expansion of the
social services available to ex-prisoners. The total cost of this
effort would be about $7 billion each year, roughly one-tenth of
total current spending on corrections. In the present climate such a
program seems entirely fanciful-how could we pay for it?

One source of funds is the vast treasury expended on large-scale
incarceration itself. By cutting the size of prison populations and
redirecting some of the spending on custody to community programs, we
could dramatically expand services to prisoners after they have been
released. Unlocking America, a recent proposal from the Washington,
D.C.-based JFA Institute, recommends four ways to reduce the size of
prison populations.

First, Unlocking America recommends decriminalizing drug offenses and
other "victimless" crimes. The authors argue that arresting drug
dealers has no crime reducing effect because new dealers will fill
the vacancies opened by incarceration. Since the mid-1990s, prominent
conservatives, too, have supported the view that incarceration for
drug dealing fails to curb the drug trade. In 1995 John DiIulio and
Anne Piehl-the former would become an appointee in the second Bush
administration-wrote that their "best estimate of the incapacitation
effect (number of drug sales prevented by incarcerating a drug
dealer) is zero," and they therefore "value drug crimes (sales and
possession) at zero social cost." Though the War on Drugs failed to
reduce drug use or the prices of drugs, it boosted incarceration and
racial disparity. Drug convictions account for about a third of the
increase in state prison populations and about three-quarters of the
increase in the federal prison population through the 1980s and '90s.

Second, time served in prison can be reduced. In the mid-1970s
prisoners were incarcerated for relatively short periods, given their
offenses. Since then, life sentences have become common for violent
offenders and those with prior felony convictions. Three-strikes
provisions add long stretches of prison time for repeat convicts.
Truth-in-sentencing requires felony offenders to serve at least 85
percent of their sentences. These measures serve to lengthen prison
time account for about half of the growth in state prison populations
over the last twenty years.

Third, the length of probation and parole-supervision periods could
also be reduced. People on probation and parole are likely to return
to prison, but usually as a result of a technical violation, not a
new crime. Unlocking America finds little evidence that lengthy
parole and probation terms reduce crime. Probationers and parolees
are most likely to fail in the first twelve months. After that first
year, the authors write, "supervision is more of a nuisance than a
means for assisting people after prison or preventing them from
committing another crime."

Finally, the authors argue that re-imprisonment should be eliminated
for technical violations of parole and probation. Parolees and
probationers are released to the community subject to a large number
of conditions that typically include employment, drug testing, and
regular meetings with case officers. When they violate these
conditions, supervising officers can send them back to prison. Many
parolees and probationers are sent back to prison for failing a drug
test or missing an appointment-their reappearence behind bars may
have nothing to do with crime. Incarceration for technical violations
of parole or probation was a significant driver of state imprisonment
rates through the 1990s. In some states, like California, most of
those on parole are re-incarcerated for technical violations, adding
a year or more to their time in prison.

Of all the proposals to reduce prison populations, restricting
re-incarceration for technical parole violators seems most
politically feasible. Some states are already trying to reduce parole
revocation, sometimes by imposing more intensive community
supervision or a few days in lock-up instead of months and years in
prison. Kansas now conducts a risk assessment for parolees. Some are
assigned to a low-risk group that receives only loose supervision.
Case managers place high-risk parolees in special programs, and
enforce a variety of punishments short of return to prison. Since
adopting these measures in 2003, Kansas has halved the number of
parole violators. Half a dozen other states, like Arizona, Illinois,
New York, and Texas, have also adopted a system of graduated
sanctions to reduce parole revocation. At the national level,
eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would reduce
prison admissions by about 30 percent each year. By itself this
measure could save much of the funds needed for a national prisoner
reentry program.

Eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would also
support a reintegrative model of corrections. Given that over half of
state prisoners struggle with problems of drug addiction, we should
anticipate that many will fail and become involved again in drugs or
miss work or parole appointments. These failures should be viewed as
a component of reentry. Relapse is part of a learning process in
which new non-cognitive skills of reliability and persistence
develop. If failure is a likely stop on the path to steady work,
parole supervision must also allow people to fail and remain in their
communities.

So far I have argued that we can edge away from mass incarceration by
promoting two kinds of policies: expanding support for the reentry of
prisoners into society and scaling down the size of the prison
population. The two steps are linked; we expand our support for
ex-prisoners in the community by using incarceration more sparingly
and revoking freedom less willingly. Money that we now spend on
prison can be spent on treatment and jobs.

There are more advocates now for reentry programs than decarceration,
but a real policy debate over the future of mass incarceration has
barely begun. Though Congress dipped a toe in the pool of
reintegrative criminal justice by passing the Second Chance Act, a
national large-dose reentry program is a much larger effort. Faced
with mounting correctional budgets, governors in Kansas and elsewhere
have experimented with parole reform. Some states are also
considering sentencing reforms. Commissions in New York and
California are now reviewing three-strikes and mandatory minimums.
Despite these signs of change, the reform process remains in its
infancy. Few correctional facilities have closed, and incarceration
rates continue to rise.

While an expanded reentry policy and a revision of the penal codes
may stop the growth of prisons, the future of mass incarceration
depends very much on its past. A less punitive criminal justice
system cannot by itself solve the deep social problems of poor urban
neighborhoods. These problems-disorder and addiction largely flowing
from chronic idleness-set in motion the politics and policy choices
that delivered mass incarceration. As America's meager welfare state
failed to prevent school dropout and persistent unemployment among
unskilled inner-city residents, prisons and jails expanded to fill
the vacuum of social control formerly occupied by the education
system and the labor market. The police, the courts, and correctional
administrators were charged with solving the social problems of
idleness, addiction, and mental illness, while also controlling their
natural jurisdiction over serious crime. But they were given just a
few tools: the powers of arrest and imprisonment. Mass incarceration
contains an unruly population beset with trouble; wholesale
confinement makes the population more manageable but leaves their
troubles undiminished.

To expect a rehabilitative criminal justice alone to reverse mass
incarceration is, in an odd way, to repeat the mistakes of the
tough-on-crime movement. We would again be turning to line officers
to manage the byproducts of deep social inequalities. While we might
spend billions on a jobs program for former prisoners, we would still
send them out to look for work in labor markets where half of the
young men are jobless. We would still be asking them to stay sober
amid a thriving street trade in illegal drugs. This is what prisoners
mean when they say they are set up to fail. This is not just a
recidivist's special pleading: it reflects the deficiencies of a
theory in which society's losers have only themselves to blame.

Reversing mass incarceration will ultimately require that social
problems be solved with social policies. The two most urgent
priorities are the prevention of school dropout and the creation of a
viable and legitimate economy in poor inner-city neighborhoods. Not
even the most rehabilitative criminal justice policy can solve these
problems. We normally think of education and employment as sources of
economic opportunity. In the era of mass incarceration, we also see
that they are positive sources of social control, providing order in
people's daily lives.

School failure and joblessness, of course, lie deep at the core of
American urban inequality. Even if our policy knowledge is equal to
these problems, the political will is weak, especially since carceral
stigma now clouds the neighborhoods of the urban poor. It seems
unlikely under these conditions that communities of concentrated
poverty will somehow launch new programs of urban renewal or that
middle class voters will discover sympathies for the poor. Are new
efforts at social investment impossible?

The upcoming election season holds more promise for an expanded
social policy than we have seen in years. The coming debate over
national health insurance holds enormous significance for communities
most affected by mass incarceration. If a plan emerges that covers
treatment for substance abuse, mental health problems, and chronic
disease, and if the plan is truly universal, carrying no exclusions
for those in prison or with felony convictions, it can significantly
improve the lives of those entangled in the penal system. By aiming
to cover everyone, national health insurance creates a common cause
between the urban poor wracked by mass incarceration and the suburban
middle class. We have recently seen this kind of cross-class support
in defense of Social Security-a universalistic and venerated
institution operating with great anti-poverty effect. Supporters
repelled the threat of privatization not because Social Security
slashes poverty among the elderly, but because it guarantees the
material dignity of all citizens in retirement.

Policies narrowly tailored only to the needs of released prisoners
can at best attract the support of altruists and the poor themselves.
The ineffectiveness of these constituencies is reflected in the
quality of these targeted policies as they currently stand. But by
actively constructing the common citizenship of the poor and the
middle class, a universal social policy provides a powerful force for
social integration.

Nearly a century ago, Eugene Debs, at his sentencing under the
Sedition Act in 1918, offered a moving account of the moral
significance of the prison. "Your Honor," he said, "years ago I
recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind
that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then,
and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while
there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in
prison, I am not free." Debs's vision was radically egalitarian.
Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one
incarcerates us all.

Be it health care, education, or job opportunities, universal
provision in any domain of public policy-and the bonds of citizenship
on which that sense of universality is built-joins us to a common
destiny, and might be the best chance for the redevelopment of urban
schools and labor markets. If the duty of the citizen is to stay in
school and go to work, then the political will to maintain good
schools and promote employment is woven into the social fabric. This
political logic implies that special projects targeting special
populations will not do the job. If poor schools are to improve, it
is more likely they will do so as a result of an effort to improve
educational opportunity nationwide. If we are to promote jobs for
unskilled men in the inner-city, the attempt will receive its
greatest impetus from a national employment policy that aims to
improve the working lives of all citizens.

Clearly we are not there yet. The norms of good citizenship, however,
develop in tandem with the institutions of civic life. Political will
can grow in small increments led by the promotion of institutions
that provide on the basis of Marshall's "basic human equality." Such
a renewal of an authentically American social citizenship would sweep
away the jobless ghetto and the mass incarceration that it has spawned.