Punishment and Inequality in America [Paperback]

Bruce Western (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2007 | ISBN-10: 087154895X | ISBN-13: 978-0871548955

Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than sevenfold 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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

BRUCE WESTERN is professor of sociology at Princeton University. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 247 pages
• Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation Publications (December 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087154895X
• ISBN-13: 978-0871548955
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #230,926 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Thorough Statistics, Excellent Readability, and an Indictment of 1980's Correction Policy April 24, 2007

By Michael M. Wehrman

Format:Hardcover

Bruce Western has stepped into the realm of public sociology, I feel, with this excellent book. This is a well-written, thoroughly researched, book that is accessible to scholars and others alike. Even though the book teems with tables, figures, and analysis, Western presents them without relying on the reader to interpret regression coefficients for meaningfulness, yet also appends many of the chapters with methodological clarifications just for those kinds of people.

Western presents what is essentially a political book without a political tone. The data speak for themselves, and it is very difficult to think that, after all the work put into this, that he incorrectly attributes so little of the decrease in crime trends to the prison boom (and the absurdity of the cost/benefit for its effect on the decrease). It does seem, however, that he echoes the racial claims of Loic Wacquant in the final chapter, but that's only for a brief moment.

Western also excellently argues and shows off the immense disconnect between crime rates and corrections policy; although only a portion of one chapter, this is a significant point to make. If our policies do not reflect what criminals are actually doing, well, why are we doing it?

My only concern with this book involves Western's "all or nothing" approach to showing the economic/social cost of the prison boom. His analyses show the wage gap, parental gap, and other penalties suffered during and after release by prisoners. He astutely points out the selection bias in unemployment and wage estimates in minority populations due to leaving out the far-more-likely-to-be-incarcerated blacks. However, his analysis in later sections, where he shows the change if none of these people were in prison (to prove the selection bias argument), is one based outside of reality. First, there will never be nobody in prison; second, his own data show that prisoners are of a different background than nonprisoners (such as the "dropping out" of the bottom that artificially raises the mean wage for blacks), so it's hard to estimate where they would fit in among family and work if they were released. Many of them would remain unemployed as well. I understand that this is some of his point, but the difficulty lies in the picture painted, where we exist in a world where the prison boom did happen, Western argues what we would look like if none of the prison boom happened, and the real effect of that is somewhere in between. He is unfoundedly optimistic about the work and family choices (and chances) in these sections of the book. It doesn't change his argument about the problems of the prison boom, however. It merely muddles the otherwise fantastic clarity of his book.

This is a book that can appeal to all sorts of scholars, researchers, policy analysts, and even those who merely wonder what direction out prison policies have taken us. An excellent, excellent work.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Prison Employee December 8, 2007

By PRH

Format:Hardcover

This is a book the policy makers and students and everyone in-between would be well served by reading. It can be a little repetitive at times, but the author makes his points well. One of the strengths of this book is that through painstaking but necessary detail in the analysis, the author shows how incarceration damages the lives of those already affected by inequality. Most authors draw correlations, but Western has been able to detail how it is not just the characteristics of those who go to prison that are responsible for recidivism, but that the process of being in prison actually exacerbates the already existing problems in social and human capital that offenders have. I would have liked the author say more about being discerning with crime policy and who should go to prison. There are some people who belong in prison, but this fact seems to be lost in the amount of evidence that is detailed in this book. This however, does not take away from the quality of the book.

The author also does a very nice job in explaining the relationship between the crime drop in the 1990s and the increase in incarceration - increased incarceration is not related to a decrease in crime. The author explains how a 66% increase in incarceration was associated with only a 2- to 5% decrease in crime, at a cost of over $50 billion clearly making the point that incarceration is not an effective means of reducing crime.

My only complaint is that the author does attack Republicans a bit much early on in his book which I believe to be counterproductive. If the author would like Republicans (those who he claims make the worst crime polices) to implement better crime policy, than he should not scare them off but rather, make them think the ideas he is espousing are their own. Just an idea.

Good book, read it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Bruce Western December 19, 2008

By K. Gove

Format:Paperback

Since the 1970's, the American penal process has changed drastically from a rehabilitative focus to one of incapacitation, deterrence and punishment. This in turn caused a drastic rise in incarceration rates throughout America. In Bruce Western's book, Punishment and Inequality in America, he uses quantitative analysis to showcase an unfortunate link between the rise of incarceration with a similar rise in the number of young, black men behind bars. He also looks into the effects incarceration has on their lives and communities before and after prison.

His effective use of statistical evaluation of such hot button topics as drug use/arrests, as well as unemployment rates and domestic abuse further connect mass incarceration with the mostly taboo issue of race. For example, when looking at the overall risk of incarceration within the context of race, Western found that in 1999 alone, 60% of black men that were high school dropouts ended up in prison; a number that is three times as high as was found twenty years prior. High school dropouts in 2006 were found to have made $10,000 to $35,000 less than that of their more educated peers. Along with that fact, it's also fair to say that these men then don't possess many valuable skills required for well paying respectable jobs. When jobless rates within the population of young black dropouts from 1980-2000 were analyzed, the rate showed joblessness increasing 14%. However, when inmates of the same caliber were included, the number was actually an increase of 24%, leading to a reality that two out of three young black dropouts were without jobs during the economic expansion of the 1990's.

While strong connections were made between inequality within black communities and incarceration, I felt his analysis of political associations was incomplete. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, while running for president, was the first Republican to link the social instability of the 1960s to street crime. He created a warning to the public of a growing menace in our country to our personal safety, to life, to limb and property. This planted a seed of heightened punitive mentality within white voters and has been repeated by decades of Republican politicians. Western only focused analysis on governors from 1980-2000. He did find that limits on judicial discretion increased in most states as more Republicans came into office. And in spite of this finding, when looking for a correlation to the drop in crime from 1993-2001, as many Republicans had linked together, Western found that the effect rehabilitation, deterrence and incapacitation had on crime during the prison boom coincided with a decrease of 2-5% of serious crimes. Looking at statistics at both the state and federal level of politics would allow for a more thorough analysis. The federal level is still an issue, especially since Senator McCain and his supporters in this last election made a point to label Senator Obama with a common label used by Republicans: soft on crime. This type of message further engrains the idea of connecting crime and harsh penalties. The conclusion was equally underdeveloped with a lack of possible alternatives to the economic and political problems addressed. In the end, Punishment and Inequality in America illuminates an otherwise hushed topic of racial inequality spurred on by an American social institution and created a well-informed stepping-stone for future sociological analysis.