Executive Summary
On the surface, crime and punishment appear to be unsophisticated matters. After all, if someone takes part in a crime, then shouldn’t he or she have to suffer the consequences? But dig deeper and it is clear that crime and punishment are multidimensional problems that stem from racial prejudice justified by age-old perceptions and beliefs about African Americans. The United States has a dual criminal justice system that has helped to maintain the economic and social hierarchy in America, based on the subjugation of blacks, within the United States. Public policy, criminal justice actors, society and the media, and criminal behavior have all played roles in creating what sociologist Loic Wacquant calls the hyperincarceration of black men. But there are solutions to rectify this problem.
To summarize the major arguments in this essay, the root cause of the hyperincarceration of blacks (and in particular black men) is society’s collective choice to become more punitive. These tough-on-crime laws, which applied to all Americans, could be maintained only because of the dual legal system developed from the legacy of racism in the United States. That is, race allowed for society to avoid the trade-off between societies “demand” to get tough on crime and its “demand” to retain civil liberties, through unequal enforcement of the law. In essence, tying crime to observable characteristics (such as race or religious affiliation) allowed the majority in society to pass tough-on-crime policies without having to bear the full burden of these policies, permitting these laws to be sustained over time.
What’s more, the history of racism, which is also linked to the history of perceptions of race and crime, has led society to choose to fight racial economic equality using the criminal justice system (i.e., incarceration) instead of choosing to reduce racial disparities through consistent investments in social programs (such as education, job training, and employment, which have greater public benefits), as King (1968) lobbied for before his assassination. In other words, society chose to use incarceration as a welfare program to deal with the poor, especially since the underprivileged are disproportionately people of color.
At the same time, many communities attempted to benefit economically from mass incarceration by using prisons as a strategy for economic growth, making the incarceration system eerily similar to the system of slavery. Given all of the documented social and economic costs of mass incarceration (e.g., inferior labor market opportunities, increases in the racial disparity in HIV/AIDS, destruction of the family unit), it can be concluded that it has helped to maintain the economic hierarchy, predicated on race, in the United States. In order to undo the damage that has been done, and in order to move beyond our racial past, we must as a nation reeducate ourselves about race; and then, as a society, commit to investing in social programs targeted toward at-risk youth. We must also ensure diversity in criminal justice professionals in order to achieve the economic equality that King fought for prior to his death. Although mass incarceration policies have recently received a great deal of attention (due to incarceration becoming prohibitively costly), failure to address the legacy of racism passed down by our forefathers and its ties to economic oppression will only result in the continued reinvention of Jim Crow.
This is part of a series of reports from the Economic Policy Institute outlining the steps we need to take
as a nation to fully achieve each of the goals of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Visit www.unfinishedmarch.com for updates and to join the Unfinished March.
The powerful never lose opportunities – they remain available to them. The powerless on the other hand, never experience opportunity – it is always arriving at a later time.—Martin Luther King Jr. (King 1968/2010, 1612)
Introduction
Hope and fear are two of the most effective tools of persuasion. Martin Luther King Jr. persuaded the hearts of a nation, and the world, with a message of hope. In fact, President Obama became the first black president of the United States, following in Dr. King’s footsteps, using hope as the cornerstone of his campaign. On the surface, Obama seemed to fulfill the roadmap for change that King provided 51 years ago in his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington. After all, a black man was voted into the highest office in the nation (arguably the world) during a time when only 13 percent of the nation self-identified as black (U.S. Census Bureau 2013). Surely, the fact that a majority of the nation cast their vote for a black president, not once but twice, indicates that the United States has made significant progress with race relations.
While Barack Obama’s ascension to the White House does suggest that we have made significant progress since the abolition of slavery, the fight for equality is far from over. After all, there are always exceptions to every rule. King did not stop his fight once African Americans attained “equality” under the law because he understood that such equality was actually costless and that the real price that society would have to pay for reversing the mass oppression of a people would come in delivering economic parity:
The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels and other facilities with whites. (King 1968/2010, 197)
In fact, in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, King (1968/2010) eloquently reasons that the real dilemma for American society is whether or not to ensure economic equality through equal pay and equal investments in human capital. Such equality would come at a much greater cost than simply allowing a group of marginalized individuals the right to vote because “… jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls” (p. 202). As King wrote, the then assistant director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Hyman Bookbinder, estimated the long-term costs of insuring true social equality to be roughly one trillion dollars (p. 205). Apparently, Bookbinder did not believe this to be a daunting task, asserting that “‘…the poor [could] stop being poor if the rich [were] willing to become even richer at a slower rate’” (p. 205).
Nonetheless, true acceptance and complete integration into the social fabric of society would only come through an overhaul of the American social structure. As he sought genuine social change, King began to encounter heightened resistance, even among white liberals who openly supported the civil rights movement, due to political backlash as fear of losing white privilege began to invade the momentum of the movement (King 1968/2010; Steinberg 1998). However, King intuitively understood that there could be no social justice without economic justice because the persistence of economic inequality (e.g., lower wages for equivalent jobs) meant the preservation of the social hierarchy that defined blacks as only partly human. While the distinction ceased to persist in the letter of the law, it continued to be true within the U.S. economic structure.
It is well documented that the U.S. first garnered recognition on the international science scene through polygeny, a theory, mostly of American descent, that postulated that different races originated from different ancestors, with whites holding a superior status to all other groups. This “science” perpetuated the long held beliefs in the United States that African Americans are a degenerate race of individuals that have an inferior intellect, that are prone to criminal behavior, and that are not equipped to govern themselves (Frederickson 1971; Steinberg 1998; A.Y. Davis 1998; Gould 1996; Wacquant 2000). In fact, these opinions are still held and are documented today in social psychology experiments that find that black criminals are typically seen as more immoral than whites who commit similar crimes (Graham and Lowery 2004).
King (1968/2010) advised that in order to progress towards true equality whites would have to put forth “…a mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance” (p. 243). Nonetheless, instead of addressing the structural barriers that kept black Americans from achieving true social justice in a laissez-fair economy, it could be argued that mainstream society used the problems in the black community, which were themselves attributable to systematic oppression, as proof of why blacks were “undeserving” of this public investment (King, 1968/2010; Steinberg 1998; A.Y. Davis 1998; Crenshaw 1998; Wacquant 2000). In fact, one reason the “Moynihan Report” became so prominent was because of its characterization of the African American community as socially pathological, even though in the report then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan attributes this “pathology” to years of oppression of the black community (U.S. Department of Labor 1965; Acs et al. 2013).
At the same time, the protest and riots of the 1960s linked the movement for equality to crime and racial violence. Growing racial tension allowed for tough on crime policies as major agenda items in election campaigns that would later pave the way for policies that led to the mass incarceration of mostly black men (Tonry 1995; Loury 2008; Western and Wildeman 2008; Raphael and Stoll 2013). Issues of race and class lie at the heart of the problem of mass incarceration, making it very complex. In fact, it can be argued that the disproportionate incarceration rate of minorities in general, and blacks in particular, is one of the most pressing civil rights issues of our time (Alexander 2010; Loury 2008; Wacquant 2008; Wacquant 2000), and an issue whose consequences extend beyond the inmate to the destruction of families and communities.
On the surface, crime and punishment appear to be unsophisticated matters. After all, if someone takes part in a crime, then shouldn’t he or she have to suffer the consequences of such actions? Nonetheless, it is argued throughout this essay that crime and punishment are multidimensional problems that are inherently tied to institutionalized racial prejudice justified by age-old perceptions and beliefs about African Americans. It is purported that the criminal justice system has become a tool used to maintain the economic and social hierarchy within the United States based on the subjugation of blacks. In the remainder of this essay I will discuss the roles that public policy, criminal justice actors, society and the media, and criminal behavior have played in creating what sociologist Loic Wacquant calls the hyperincarceration of black men. I will then discuss possible solutions to rectify this problem.
How did we get here? The causes of mass incarceration
Although mass incarceration can be attributed to public policy, these policies were sustained over time because of institutionalized racism. The disproportionate imprisonment of African Americans that ensued resulted from the link between perceptions of race and crime, and the subconscious desire to maintain the American economic social structure, which places blacks at the bottom and whites at the top.
Public policy
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Figure A
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Rate of imprisonment in state or federal correctional facilities, 1925–2011
Year
Imprisonment rate
1925
79
1926
83
1927
91
1928
96
1929
98
1930
104
1931
110
1932
110
1933
109
1934
109
1935
113
1936
113
1937
118
1938
123
1939
137
1940
132
1941
124
1942
112
1943
102
1944
100
1945
101
1946
100
1947
106
1948
108
1949
111
1950
111
1951
110
1952
110
1953
111
1954
115
1955
114
1956
115
1957
116
1958
120
1959
119
1960
119
1961
120
1962
118
1963
115
1964
112
1965
109
1966
102
1967
99
1968
94
1969
98
1970
97
1971
96
1972
94
1973
97
1974
103
1975
113
1976
122
1977
128
1978
130
1979
132
1980
134
1981
150
1982
166
1983
173
1984
181
1985
195
1986
215
1987
222
1988
238
1989
264
1990
284
1991
300
1992
319
1993
338
1994
367
1995
393
1996
407
1997
420
1998
433
1999
432
2000
421
2001
421
2002
429
2003
432
2004
436
2005
438
2006
443
2007
445
2008
443
2009
438
2010
434
2011
423
Source: Author's calculation of Minor-Harper (1986) and Carson and Mulako-Wangota (2013)
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Over the past 40 years U.S. incarceration has grown at an extraordinary rate. However, this has not always been the case. Figure A provides historical estimates of the imprisonment rate in state and federal facilities and it demonstrates that from 1925 until about the middle of the 1970s the rate did not rise above 140 persons imprisoned per 100,000 of the population. However, the extraordinary growth of the imprisonment rate after 1974 eventually led to unprecedented levels of incarceration. While the increase in incarceration could be driven by changes in policy and/or changes in criminal behavior, Raphael and Stoll (2013) find that the lion’s share of the growth in the prison population can be accounted for by society’s choice for tough-on-crime policies (e.g., determinate sentencing, truth-in-sentencing laws, limiting discretionary parole boards, etc.) resulting in more individuals (committing less serious offenses) being sentenced to serve time, and longer prison sentences. Stated differently, individuals are imprisoned for crimes that they would not have been incarcerated for in the past, and those who committed offenses that would have previously warranted confinement receive much longer prison terms. Lastly, a large fraction of society is on parole, and parolees are more likely to violate parole and return to prison than in the past (Raphael and Stoll 2013). Raphael and Stoll (2013) attribute no more than 9 percent of the increase in state incarceration since 1984 to changes in criminal behavior. They find little to no evidence for the most common factors posited for the extraordinary increase in the U.S. incarceration rate: 1) changes in the relative returns to legal activity (e.g., declining low-skill wages) relative to illegal activity (changes in drug markets in general, and crack cocaine in particular), 2) increases in criminal behavior (e.g., violent crime) due to the introduction of crack cocaine, and 3) the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill.
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Figure B
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Male lifetime likelihood of going to state or federal prison, by race and ethnicity, 1974–2001
Black male
White male
Hispanic male
All male
1974
13.4%
2.2%
4%
3.6%
1979
13.4
2.5
6
4.1
1986
17.4
3.6
11.1
6
1991
29.4
4.4
16.3
9.1
1997
31
5.4
18
10.6
2001
32.2
5.9
17.2
11.3
Notes: The black and white categories exclude persons of Hispanic origin. Percents represent the chances of being admitted to state or federal prison during a lifetime. Estimates were obtained by applying age-specific first incarceration and mortality rates for each group to a hypothetical population of 100,000 births. See methodology section in Bonczar (2003).
Source: Bonczar (2003)
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Figure C
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Female lifetime likelihood of going to state or federal prison, by race and ethnicity, 1974–2001
Black female
White female
Hispanic female
All women
1974
1.1%
0.2%
0.4%
0.3%
1979
1.4
0.2
0.4
0.4
1986
1.8
0.3
0.9
0.6
1991
3.6
0.5
1.5
1.1
1997
4.9
0.7
2.2
1.5
2001
5.6
0.9
2.2
1.8
Notes: The black and white categories exclude persons of Hispanic origin. Percents represent the chances of being admitted to state or federal prison during a lifetime. Estimates were obtained by applying age-specific first incarceration and mortality rates for each group to a hypothetical population of 100,000 births. See methodology section in Bonczar (2003).
Source: Bonczar (2003)
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Figures B and C plot the lifetime likelihood of a first incarceration at a state or federal prison for individuals born between 1974 and 2001disaggregated by race and ethnicity for men and women respectively. The lifetime likelihood of a first incarceration has greatly increased over time and this is especially true for blacks and Hispanics. The rate of change for men is greatest between 1986 and 1991 while the rate of change for women is highest between 1986 and 1997.1 The years of the extreme increase in slope coincides with the Reagan administration’s enhancement of Nixon’s war on drugs2 through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. One significant piece of this legislation, which is held responsible for the disproportionate rates of incarceration among African Americans in federal prisons, is the mandatory minimums for drug offenses including the disparities in sentencing between cocaine and the cheaper crack cocaine (see Raphael and Stoll 2013). However, the version of this bill passed in 1988 also provided substantial monetary incentives for state and local police agencies to implement the war on drugs (which was not previously a priority) through the Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program (Byrne Program).
A 1993 GAO report states: “Byrne program grants are the primary source of federal financial assistance for state and local drug law enforcement efforts” (GAO 1993, 2). This grant, along with civil forfeiture laws passed in 1984 allowing state and local police to share in drug-related assets, provided substantial resources to state and local law enforcement to focus on the drug war. Arguably these monetary incentives, coupled with Supreme Court rulings empowering police with unprecedented discretion to stop and search citizens with little to no probable cause, have played a role in the excessive incarceration rates we see today and the disproportionate imprisonment of African Americans (Alexander 2010; Sandy 2002; Benson and Rasmussen 1996; Blumenson and Nilsen 1998; Tieger 1971; and Russell 1998).
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Figure D
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White arrest rates by offense type, 1980 and 2009
1980
2009
Homicide
5.3
2.5
Rape
9.9
6.4
Robbery
30.9
22
Aggravated assault
89.6
108.8
Simple assault
168.6
350.2
Burglary
184.8
81
Larceny
415
369
Motor vehicle theft
48.6
20.3
Weapon
53.9
38.8
Possession
182.1
367.3
Drug sale
43.7
72.5
Source: Author's calculation from Snyder (2011) for 1980 data and FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program data (U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation 2009) for 2009
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Figure E
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Black arrest rates by offense type, 1980 and 2009
1980
2009
Homicide
35
14.8
Rape
70.7
19.7
Robbery
314.3
171.5
Aggravated assault
366.6
344.8
Simple assault
569.6
1023.8
Burglary
544.7
229
Larceny
1337.6
941.1
Motor vehicle theft
151.8
71.7
Weapon
221.5
165.4
Possession
341
1039.6
Drug sale
163.9
311.6
Source: Author's calculation from Snyder (2011) for 1980 data and FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program data (U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation 2009) for 2009
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Figure F
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Percentage change in arrests, by race, 1980–2009
White
Black
Homicide
-53
-58
Rape
-35
-72
Robbery
-29
-45
Aggravated assault
21
-6
Burglary
-56
-58
Larceny
-11
-30
Motor vehicle theft
-58
-53
Simple assault
108
80
Weapons
-28
-25
Drug possession
102
205
Drug sales
66
90
Source: Author's calculation from Snyder (2011) for 1980 data and FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program data (U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation 2009) for 2009
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Although arrest rates and incarceration rates are often used to gauge criminal activity, they are not pure measures of such behavior because they also reflect policy decisions as well as biases due to selective law enforcement. Figure D shows arrest rates in 1980 and 2009 for whites, Figure E provides the same data for blacks, and Figure F provides the percentage change in arrests over this period for blacks and whites for each crime category displayed. Figures D and E show that African Americans have much higher arrest rates than whites in every category. Figure F illustrates that except for whites arrested for aggravated assault, all other Index Part I crimes (homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft) decreased for both blacks and whites. The only other crimes to experience significant increases in arrest from 1980 to 2009 are the less serious offenses of simple assault, drug possession, and drug sales.
Figure G shows how the shift in focus to less serious crimes translated into changes in the distribution of offenses for individuals incarcerated in state prison from 1979 to 2009. It is clear from the figure that there was a decrease in the share of individuals sentenced to state facilities for violent crimes and property crimes, but large increases in imprisonment for less serious crimes such as drug crimes and other crimes, echoing the findings by Raphael and Stoll (2013) that a sizeable portion of the increase in incarceration was due to a focus on less serious offenses such as nonviolent drug offenses.3
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Figure G
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Percentage change in the distribution of state prison offenses, 1979–2009
Category
Percentage change
Violent
-7%
Property
-38
Drug
151
Other
52
Source: Author's calculations from Guerino et al. (2011) and U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics (1982)
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Although policing decisions are typically made at the state and local levels, the federal government can still influence local law enforcement choices through laws and intergovernmental grant programs. These concessions (discussed above) were offered to state and local law authorities in order to garner support for the war on drugs. Such allowances (e.g., civil forfeiture laws and Edward Byrne Memorial grants) are dangerous for two reasons: 1) as demonstrated above, these programs distort policy and monitoring decisions, and 2) these laws produce “…self-financing, unaccountable law enforcement agencies divorced from any meaningful legislative oversight” (Blumenson and Nilsen, 1998). Within a public choice framework, more police resources do not necessarily lead to lower crime rates. On the contrary, such allowances may provide police with motives to keep crime/arrest rates high since arrest rates are a measure of their efficacy and demand, and are now tied to federal funding. Thus, the availability of these targeted resources could explain police agencies switching focus to drugs (as well as other Part II crimes, such as simple assault) along with the increasing criminalization of less-serious offenses leading to prisons becoming filled with low-level drug offenders (Andreozzi 2004; Benson and Rasmussen 1996: Benson, Kim, and Rasmussen 1994).
At the same time, impoverished rural communities began seeking to use prison construction as part of their economic development strategies. Political officials hoped prisons would be a recession-proof industry that would help to stimulate their economies through job creation and regional multiplier effects (Farrigan and Glasmeier 2007; Kirchhoff 2010). Among 1,500 prison facilities constructed by 1995, Farrigan and Glasmeier (2007) find that 39 percent were located in rural communities, with the rural facilities holding higher percentages of males and blacks than urban prisons. In addition, the private sector also began to view the expanding prison population as a source of economic opportunity (Cheung 2002).
Putting the pieces of the puzzle together leads to the following system of mass incarceration: more punitive crime policies and a national push for the drug war (for political gain), which led state and local law enforcement to shift their focus to policing and punishing less serious lawbreakers such as drug offenders and those committing simple assault,4 which in turn spurred a boom in the prison population causing state and local officials to lobby for prison construction as a tool for economic growth and leading private industry to seek opportunities for profit among the incarcerated. The end result is political and economic systems reliant on communities in chaos (also see a discussion of this by Loury 2008). While the preceding thoughts may shed light on the growth in the incarcerated population, they do not explain how African Americans, who make up less than 13 percent of the population, came to account for over half of the prison population during the height of the prison boom.
Perceptions of race, criminality, and social stratification
Black children born in 2001 are roughly 5.5 times more likely than their white counterparts to be incarcerated (Bonczar 2003). However, taken from a historical perspective this disparity is not unusual. By analyzing the ratio of the proportion of prison admissions rates to the proportion of the population by race (see Figure H) from 1926 to 1993, it is clear that blacks have historically experienced incarceration rates above their proportion in society. Nonetheless, it is also apparent that the disparity has become exacerbated over time. From a political economy perspective, it could be argued that the prison system has been used as a tool to usurp black (and poor white) labor, as a form of social control during economic downturns, and as a method to maintain social order when poor marginalized groups (e.g., black men) with high rates of unemployment increase in size (Myers 1993; Wacquant 2000).
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Figure H
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Ratio of proportion admitted to prison to share of population, by race, 1926–1993
year
White
Black
1926
0.8646896
2.199833
1927
0.8646989
2.17144
1928
0.8733817
2.131757
1929
0.8711722
2.17002
1930
0.8565032
2.318197
1931
0.8650528
2.23481
1932
0.8634449
2.239778
1933
0.8481098
2.364207
1934
0.8382051
2.46356
1935
0.8251895
2.56838
1936
0.8192377
2.618846
1937
0.8115541
2.682416
1938
0.8105729
2.702562
1939
0.8102447
2.705249
1940
0.7883061
2.897598
1941
0.7761271
2.992737
1942
0.7598836
3.139206
1943
0.7663909
3.073601
1944
0.77003
3.016577
1945
0.7632093
3.100061
1946
0.7362881
3.351378
1947
0.7734134
3.002343
1948
0.7783268
2.947933
1949
0.7855678
2.899025
1950
0.7734575
2.985587
1960
0.7420148
3.062132
1964
0.7342211
3.111357
1970
0.6919973
3.509817
1974
0.6716154
3.234681
1975
0.7310312
2.973519
1976
0.7077293
3.019088
1977
0.7055128
3.145308
1978
0.655506
3.406392
1979
0.7044626
3.261237
1980
0.6823106
3.370042
1981
0.6756689
3.516932
1982
0.6514124
3.617326
1983
0.6901026
3.37294
1984
0.6847866
3.328413
1985
0.6379915
3.297802
1986
0.6202134
3.355173
1987
0.6535816
3.771335
1988
0.5992618
4.103139
1989
0.564021
4.284014
1990
0.5723963
4.16193
1991
0.5528145
4.264695
1992
0.5504394
4.262562
1993
0.5566475
4.206541
Source: Author's calculations from Gibson and Jung (2002), National Prisoners Statistics (U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics), and Brown et al. (1996)
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When the political and economic threat of these groups is low, society becomes less punitive. It can be reasoned that the political gains by African Americans during the civil rights movement, followed by the urban flight of manufacturing jobs and an increase in the unemployed, led to society’s desire to use the penal system to control black labor. Along the same lines, the penal system could also be viewed as a form of welfare for young, poor minority men. In fact, it can be argued that the criminal justice system in general, and prisons in particular, have become the primary method used to maintain the U.S. social structure predicated on the hegemony of whites, with blacks viewed by many as an underserving deviant group (Loury 2008). It could also be reasoned that after the civil rights movement made it socially and legally unacceptable to deny individual rights based on race, incarceration became the ideal tool to restore control and uphold this social order (Alexander 2010). In fact, empirical research has found that imprisonment is used to regulate excess black unemployment (Myers and Sabol 1987).
More recent research finds that there are strong effects of incarceration on employment and earnings (e.g., see Raphael and Stoll 2013, Pager 2003; Pager, Western, and Suggie 2009; Raphael 2014; and Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009), the burden of which is disproportionately felt in the black community, since African Americans are excessively incarcerated. Incarceration diminishes employment and earnings prospects, especially for young black men (Holzer 2009; Pager, Western, and Suggie 2009; Pager, 2003; Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009). Due to large numbers of black men incarcerated, it has also been found that black-white employment and earnings disparities have been underestimated (Western and Pettit 2000; Chandra, 2003). In particular, there is evidence that arrests may explain almost two-thirds of the black-white gap in employment for young men (Grogger 1992) and that incarceration explained one-third of this differential in 2000 (Raphael 2006). Moreover, new research suggests that the higher relative arrest rates of blacks compared to whites might limit black upward mobility, and lead to inferior occupational placements (e.g., preclude blacks from consideration for managerial positions, in which being absent—due to an arrest—is more costly to employers (Bailey 2014).5
After accounting for selection bias, Chandra (2003) estimates that black-white wage differentials actually diverged between 1980 and 1990, and that incarceration can account for almost 50 percent of this divergence. Western and Pettit (2005) also find that from 1980 to 1999, the black-white wage differential increased among working-age men after accounting for incarceration-induced selection bias.
Moreover, using audit studies, Pager (2003) and Pager, Western, and Bonikowski (2009), find that employment opportunities for minorities are hurt more by an incarceration. However, incarceration does not affect everyone in the same way: Low-skilled white males recently released from prison receive just as many, if not more call backs than blacks and Hispanics without a criminal record (Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009). It is interesting to note that, although low-skilled white male employment is hurt by an incarceration, previously incarcerated white men are still ranked in the economic hierarchy at the same level as low-skilled Hispanic and black men without criminal records.
To further illustrate this point, Figure I (derived from estimates from Pettit and Western 2004) provides an estimate of the cumulative risk of imprisonment by age 30–34 for two differe