An address presented at one of 47 different sessions of the Forty-Second National Conference of Charities and Correction, held in Baltimore for a week in May 1915.

C. C. CARSTENS was secretary and general agent of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

“By documenting how our nation’s data collection infrastructure systematically undercounts currently or formerly incarcerated individuals, Becky Pettit leaves the reader with this deeply unsettling realization: our empirical understanding of the era of mass incarceration is fundamentally inadequate. This timely book should spur two reactions. We must revise our data collection systems. We must also acknowledge our limited ability to document prison’s consequences. By forcing this uncomfortable look in the mirror, Pettit has performed an invaluable service.”
—Jeremy Travis, John Jay College of Criminal Justice 

“Invisible Men is an important book. Becky Pettit pulls back the curtain on a hidden population marginalized by mass incarceration. Her analysis masterfully challenges the conventional statistics of racial inequality and reveals a history of African American progress stalled by the growth of the nation’s prisons.”
—Bruce Western, Harvard University 

“In this brilliant and timely book, Becky Pettit systematically upends a generation of social science research on American racial progress. With clear prose and< convincing evidence, Invisible Men shows how the failure to properly count prisoners has distorted official statistics on education, employment, politics, and health. The book’s policy importance cannot be overstated: unless and until we improve data quality, our policy efforts will be guided by a funhouse mirror image rather than reliable and accurate social facts. Even as Invisible Men demonstrates that things are sometimes worse than they appear, it offers a hopeful reform agenda for improving our data and our policy prescriptions.”
—Christopher Uggen, University of Minnesota

For African American men without a high school diploma, being in prison or jail is more common than being employed—a sobering reality that calls into question post-Civil Rights era social gains. Nearly 70 percent of young black men will be imprisoned at some point in their lives, and poor black men with low levels of education make up a disproportionate share of incarcerated Americans. In Invisible Men, sociologist Becky Pettit demonstrates another vexing fact of mass incarceration: most national surveys do not account for prison inmates, a fact that results in a misrepresentation of U.S. political, economic, and social conditions in general and black progress in particular. Invisible Men provides an eye-opening examination of how mass incarceration has concealed decades of racial inequality.

Pettit marshals a wealth of evidence correlating the explosion in prison growth with the disappearance of millions of black men into the American penal system. She shows that, because prison inmates are not included in most survey data, statistics that seemed to indicate a narrowing black-white racial gap—on educational attainment, work force participation, and earnings—instead fail to capture persistent racial, economic, and social disadvantage among African Americans. Federal statistical agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau, collect surprisingly little information about the incarcerated, and inmates are not included in household samples in national surveys. As a result, these men are invisible to most mainstream social institutions, lawmakers, and nearly all social science research that isn't directly related to crime or criminal justice. Since merely being counted poses such a challenge, inmates' lives—including their family background, the communities they come from, or what happens to them after incarceration—are even more rarely examined. And since correctional budgets provide primarily for housing and monitoring inmates, with little left over for job training or rehabilitation, a large population of young men are not only invisible to society while in prison but also ill-equipped to participate upon release.

Invisible Men provides a vital reality check for social researchers, lawmakers, and anyone who cares about racial equality. The book shows that more than a half century after the first civil rights legislation, the dismal fact of mass incarceration inflicts widespread and enduring damage by undermining the fair allocation of public resources and political representation, by depriving the children of inmates of their parents' economic and emotional participation, and, ultimately, by concealing African American disadvantage from public view.

BECKY PETTIT is professor of sociology at the University of Washington.

On Record provides descriptive accounts of record keeping in a variety of important organizations: schools, from elementary to graduate school; consumer credit agencies, general business organizations, and life insurance companies; the military and security agencies; the Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration; public welfare agencies, juvenile courts, and mental hospitals. It also examines the legal status of records. The authors pose questions such as the following: Who determines what records are kept? Who has access to the records?

STANTON WHEELER is professor of law and sociology at Yale University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Rodolfo Alvarez, Pierce Baker, Ivar Berg, Nancy Bordier, David Caplovitz, Burton R. Clark, Kai T. Erikson, Daniel E. Gilbertson, Abraham S. Goldstein, David A. Goslin, Adwin M. Lemert, Roger M. Lemert, Roger W. Little, Wilbert E. Moore, Jesse Orlansky, H. Laurence Ross, James Rule, James Salvate, Joseph Steinberg, Stanton Wheeler, Don H. Zimmerman.

Winner of the 2008 Michael J. Hindelang Book Award from the American Society of Criminology

Winner of the 2007 Albert J. Reiss, Jr. Distinguished Scholarship Award

"Punishment and Inequality in America is a searing examination of the effects of mass imprisonment on poor black men. Sent to prison in extraordinary numbers, they come out with substantially worsened prospects for employment, income, marriage, and responsible parenting. Bruce Western has now made these huge, but little recognized, effects perfectly clear. The exclusion of prisoners from employment statistics makes black employment rates, incomes, and economic progress look much better than they are. Western offers no easy answers but the message is clear-racial inequality will not diminish by much until mass imprisonment becomes part of America's past."
-MICHAEL H. TONRY, Marvin J. Sonosky Professor of Law and Public Policy, University of Minnesota

"Reflecting a rare combination of empirical analysis and social conscience, Bruce Western skillfully explores the intersection of three troubling phenomena in modern America: the era of mass incarceration, the stubborn racial divide, and the worsening economic prospects of unskilled African American men. This sobering and ambitious book is destined to become the definitive examination of a tragic chapter in American history. For those who care about the direction of our country, Punishment and Inequality in America is a required text."
-JEREMY TRAVIS, president, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York

"The consequences of incarceration have traditionally been debated in terms of crime control. Bruce Western is one of the leading scholars of a new movement that seeks to understand institutions of social control within the broader scope of social inequality. Punishment and Inequality in America brings together in one place the results of his research program, essential reading for a deeper appreciation of the role that mass incarceration has played in an increasingly stratified society."
-ROBERT J. SAMPSON, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and chair, Department of Sociology, Harvard University

Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought.

Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting “tough on crime” with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime.

The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men’s lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.

BRUCE WESTERN is professor of sociology at Princeton University.

"Trust in the Law is one of the most creative policy-relevant studies I have read. This book is replete with insightful arguments about variations in citizen responses to the criminal justice system, arguments that are theoretically derived and empirically based. Anyone concerned about effective law enforcement in the United States must read this book."
-William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

"Trust in the Law reports keystone findings in one of the most important research programs in social science in the past few decades. A landmark contribution; one that gives us genuine guidance on how to maintain the legitimacy of our institutions of social control. The societal importance of these findings is absolutely central, and surprisingly optimistic."
-John M. Darley, Princeton University

"Trust in the Law is a significant contribution to understanding why, when, and which citizens are most likely to comply with the police and the courts. The key is 'street-level bureaucrats' who are perceived as fair and trustworthy, and as treating citizens well. Tom Tyler and Yuen Huo make their case with detailed analysis of interviews that capture personal experiences among diverse ethnic groups in several cities. The result is a book that persuasively and refreshingly contradicts the rationale for current government practice. It is an important advance on Tyler's own path-breaking work on procedural justice and offers a major building block for a system of legal regulation built on an accurate human psychology."
-Margaret Levi, University of Washington

"In Trust in the Law, Yuen Huo and Tom Tyler have taken a major new step in work on psychological jurisprudence. Treating people fairly and convincing them that regulatory motives are honorable paves a path to trust in the law. Reckless resort to deterrence can rupture that path and shatter trust. These findings have profound importance for how we must change the direction of our regulatory policies."
-John Braithwaite, Chair, Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University

Public opinion polls suggest that American's trust in the police and courts is declining. The same polls also reveal a disturbing racial divide, with minorities expressing greater levels of distrust than whites. Practices such as racial profiling, zero-tolerance and three-strikes laws, the use of excessive force, and harsh punishments for minor drug crimes all contribute to perceptions of injustice. In Trust in the Law, psychologists Tom R. Tyler and Yuen J. Huo present a compelling argument that effective law enforcement requires the active engagement and participation of the communities it serves, and argue for a cooperative approach to law enforcement that appeals to people's sense of fair play, even if the outcomes are not always those with which they agree.

Based on a wide-ranging survey of citizens who had recent contact with the police or courts in Oakland and Los Angeles, Trust in the Law examines the sources of people's favorable and unfavorable reactions to their encounters with legal authorities. Tyler and Huo address the issue from a variety of angles: the psychology of decision acceptance, the importance of individual personal experiences, and the role of ethnic group identification. They find that people react primarily to whether or not they are treated with dignity and respect, and the degree to which they feel they have been treated fairly helps to shape their acceptance of the legal process. Their findings show significantly less willingness on the part of minority group members who feel they have been treated unfairly to trust the motives to subsequent legal decisions of law enforcement authorities.

Since most people in the study generalize from their personal experiences with individual police officers and judges, Tyler and Huo suggest that gaining maximum cooperation and consent of the public depends upon fair and transparent decision-making and treatment on the part of law enforcement officers. Tyler and Huo conclude that the best way to encourage compliance with the law is for legal authorities to implement programs that foster a sense of personal involvement and responsibility. For example, community policing programs, in which the local population is actively engaged in monitoring its own neighborhood, have been shown to be an effective tool in improving police-community relationships.

Cooperation between legal authorities and community members is a much discussed but often elusive goal. Trust in the Law shows that legal authorities can behave in ways that encourage the voluntary acceptance of their directives, while also building trust and confidence in the overall legitimacy of the police and courts.

TOM R. TYLER is professor of psychology at New York University.

YUEN J. HUO is professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles

A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust