LIFE SENTENCE

It's A Government Program Whose Impact Rivals the New Deal. It Pushes
Whole Communities Out of Society's Mainstream. It Costs Tens of
Billions of Dollars a Year. Scholars Are Just Beginning to Understand
How Prison Is Reshaping the Country.

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 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, most recently in the Boston Review. "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 will hear testimony from Western,
Loury, and others on the economic and social costs of the prison
boom. The session will be 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. 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 the sociologist Lawrence
Bobo, who left Harvard for Stanford two years ago but is returning in
January, 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 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
reentering society each year, the trends cannot be ignored. The
current US 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," 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," says Western.

Mass incarceration, 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 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 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, Pager found that her black
applicants with criminal records got called for an interview - or to
interview on the spot, as they applied in person - 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 Pager
summarizes her findings. (Pager 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, 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.

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. (Some 9 percent of all black children now
have a father in jail.)

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.

Black Americans' concerns about the justice system burst to the fore
in Jena, La., last week when thousands protested prosecutors' tough
treatment of six black teenagers after an assault on a white student.
When Bobo looks broadly at black attitudes about the justice system,
he doesn't find them irrational.

"We as a society," Bobo wrote last year, "have normalized and, for
the time being, depoliticized a remarkable set of social conditions."

Policy makers 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, 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 Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and
conservatives like Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) have cosponsored
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 reentry into their communities.

A handful of cities, including Boston, no longer ask applicants for
city jobs whether they have a criminal record, although their
backgrounds can still be checked later. A growing "Ban the Box"
movement - referring to the check-off box on an application,
signaling a conviction - is designed to reduce the kind of upfront
discrimination Pager identifies. San Francisco and St. Paul have also
signed off on the idea, while Los Angeles is pondering it.

To these ideas, 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.

Such proposals would do nothing to roll back prison populations, but
bills introduced by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Orrin Hatch
(R-Utah), and Biden to raise the amount of crack cocaine that
triggers automatic five- and ten-year sentences might do so. (The
possession of crack - typically a drug of the poor, and specifically
the black poor - is penalized far more harshly than the powdered
cocaine preferred by middle- and upper-class drug users.) Bruce
Western advocates ending mandatory minimum sentences for drug
conviction, and adds some further thoughts about reducing prison
populations: "We could be spending money and social services to
reduce the risks that make people likely to go to prison in the first
place - on drug addiction, on mental-health services, on housing."

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, and coverage in the mainstream media of the protests in
Jena, "I do sense there is a public conversation beginning," Western says.