Punishment and Inequality in America

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.