SENTENCED FOR LIFE

What if our prison system wasn't just a reflection of society - but a
force that shaped it? CHRISTOPHER SHEA explores a new way of looking
at lock-up.

What if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed?

And what if, instead of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this
multibillion-dollar project steadily drove poor communities further
and further out of the American mainstream?

That's how America should think about its growing prison system, some
leading social scientists are saying, in research that suggests
prisons have a far deeper impact on the nation than simply punishing
criminals. Fueled by the war on drugs, "three strike" laws and
mandatory minimum sentences, America's prisons and jails now house
some 2.2 million inmates - roughly seven times the figure of the
early 1970s. And Americans are investing vast resources to keep the
system running: The cost to maintain American correctional
institutions is some $60 billion a year. For years sociologists saw
prisons - with their disproportionately poor, black and uneducated
populations - partly as mirrors of the social and economic
disparities that cleave American life. Now, however, a new crop of
books and articles are looking at the penal system not just as a
reflection of society but as a force that shapes it.

In this view, the system takes men with limited education and job
skills and stigmatizes them in a way that makes it hard for them to
find jobs, slashes their wages when they do find them and brands them
as bad future spouses. The effects of imprisonment ripple out from
prisoners, breaking up families and further impoverishing
neighborhoods, creating the conditions for more crime down the road.
Prisons have grown into potent "engines of inequality," in the words
of sociologist Bruce Western. The penal system, he and other scholars
suggest, actively widens the gap between the poor - especially poor
black men - and everyone else.

"This is a historic transformation of the character of American
society," says Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist who has
begun to write on this topic. "We are managing the losers by
confinement." The shift isn't just academic.

In national politics, concern about the people who actually go to
prison has been drowned out by tough-on-crime rhetoric, but today the
issue is getting a hearing from some politicians, and not just
hard-left liberals.

On Oct. 4, Congress's Joint Economic Committee heard testimony from
Dr. Western, Dr. Loury, and others on the economic and social costs
of the prison boom; the session was chaired by Jim Webb, the gruff,
moderate Democratic senator from Virginia. Cities including Boston
and San Francisco are changing their hiring practices to destigmatize
prisoners, and there is detectable momentum in Congress toward
reducing the extraordinarily harsh minimum sentences for possession
of crack cocaine, which disproportionately affect poor black
Americans. The issue has arrived on the public agenda in part because
of the work done by a handful of leading sociologists. Dr. Western's
2006 book Punishment and Inequality in America is a key work in this
new scholarly movement.

Devah Pager, a Princeton sociologist, has been making headlines since
her dissertation, completed in 2002 at the University of Wisconsin,
demonstrated how a criminal record - even for nonviolent drug
offenses - made it nearly impossible for black ex-convicts in
Milwaukee to land a job. This month, a book based on that work,
Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass
Incarceration, appears in bookstores. And sociologist Lawrence Bobo
has been investigating how the growing black prison population is
eroding African-Americans' confidence in the rule of law.

For years, the penal system was a marginal topic among sociologists,
catching the interest chiefly of professors with an interest in
hard-core criminology. But in the past decade, discussion of
incarceration has moved to the center of the field, in the work of
respected scholars at top institutions who are interested in a broad
understanding of American inequality.

"My sense of it is just that the sheer mass, the weight of the
reality of what's happening, has sunk in," says Dr. Loury.

With black men in their early 30s more likely to have been in prison
than to have graduated from college, and with 700,000 ex-prisoners
re-entering society each year, the trends cannot be ignored.

The current U.S. rate of some 750 prisoners per 100,000 citizens is
several times higher than rates in Europe - higher, even, than the
rates in formerly repressive states like Russia or South Africa.

In Punishment and Inequality in America, Dr. Western documented the
degree to which poor black communities across America live in a
penitentiary shadow. Of black males born in the late 1960s who did
not attend college, 30 percent have served time in prison, he pointed
out. For high-school dropouts, the figure is a startling 59 percent.
"I don't think the really deep penetration of the criminal justice
system into poor and minority communities has been fully understood
by people outside these communities," he says. Mass incarceration,
Dr. Western argues, also renders invisible a substantial portion of
American poverty.

At the height of the tech boom in 2000, he points out, 65 percent of
black male high school dropouts weren't working. Government
statistics, however, said the unemployment level of this group was 33
percent, because government surveys exclude prisoners. At the root of
prison's broader social impact lies its lingering effect on individual lives.

In an ideal penal system, prisoners might exit the system having paid
their debt to society and be more or less restored to their previous
status as free men and women.

But Dr. Pager's book demonstrates just how detached from reality that
view is. She had four college students, two black and two white, pose
as applicants for low-level jobs in Milwaukee (excluding jobs where a
criminal record would have disqualified them). They used resumes that
were nearly identical - high school degrees, steady progress from
entry-level work to a supervisory position - except that in some
cases the applicant had a drug conviction in his past (possession
with intent to distribute) for which he served an 18-month sentence
and then behaved perfectly on parole.

In surveys conducted by Dr. Pager, 62 percent of Milwaukee employers
said they'd consider hiring an applicant with a nonviolent drug
offense in his past. But in her field study, she found that her black
applicants with criminal records were asked for an interview a mere 5
percent of the time. That compared with 14 percent for the black
applicants without a criminal record. Meanwhile, the white applicants
with a record were called back 17 percent of the time, compared with
34 percent for the white men lacking the blotch on their resume. "Two
strikes" - blackness and a record - "and you're out" is how Dr. Pager
summarizes her findings. (She has replicated this study in New York
City, with similar results.) Job prospects for black ex-prisoners in
Milwaukee may be even worse in the future, Dr. Pager argues in
Marked, because while the vast majority of job growth is in the
suburbs, the gap between employers' receptiveness to black and white
ex-convicts is even wider there.

Dr. Western explores the same set of post-prison issues on a broader
statistical canvas.

He found that whites, Hispanics and blacks all face a hit in their
wages of about a third, relative to their peers, when they emerge
from prison and also work fewer weeks per year. Their peers will see
significant raises from ages 25 to 35, but the ex-prisoners won't,
widening the gap. Former prisoners, too, are far less likely ever to
marry, but no less likely to have kids, meaning that prisons
contribute to the epidemic of female-headed, single-parent households.

Sociologists and a few politicians are not the only ones aware of
these trends, argues Lawrence Bobo. Black Americans interpret them as
evidence of stark racism, according to surveys he's done.
Seventy-nine percent of white Americans, for example, think drug laws
are enforced fairly, compared with 34 percent of black Americans.

Policymakers are slowly beginning to reckon with some aspects of
these developments. In 2004, President Bush, in his State of the
Union address, acknowledged some of the challenges caused by mass
incarceration, Dr. Pager points out, describing the hundreds of
thousands exiting prisons annually as a "group of Americans in need
of help." And this year liberals like Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and
conservatives like Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., have co-sponsored the
so-called Second Chance Act. It would provide $192 million for drug
counseling, family counseling, housing and mentorship for
ex-offenders to assist their re-entry into their communities. And a
handful of cities no longer ask applicants for city jobs whether they
have a criminal record, although their backgrounds can still be
checked later. To these ideas, Dr. Pager would add a policy modeled
on how we treat debtors: After a certain amount of time, records of
most convictions, especially for nonviolent offenses, would be expunged.

Stigma would have a deadline. And Dr. Western advocates ending
mandatory minimum sentences for drug conviction.

In a campaign year, the prison issue is a tough one - such arguments
don't have the easy pull on voters that "tough on crime" policies do.
Yet with Congress calling prison experts to testify about their
research, "I do sense there is a public conversation beginning," Dr.
Western says.