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Page 13 Prison's Dilemma Even if every convict were rightly sentenced, America's vast, racially skewed incarceration system would still be morally indefensible. By Glenn C. Loury 144 September 2013 Glenn C. Loury Over the past four decades, the United States has become a vastly punitive nation, without historical precedent or interna tional parallel. With roughly 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. currently confines about one-quarter of the world's prison inmates. In 2008, one in a hundred American adults was behind bars. Just what manner of people does our prison policy reveal us to be? America, with great armies deployed abroad under a banner of freedom, nev ertheless harbors the largest infrastructure for the mass deprivation of liberty on the planet. We imprison nearly as great a frac tion of our population to a lifetime in jail (around 70 people for every 100,000 resi dents) than Sweden, Denmark, and Norway imprison for any duration whatsoever. That America's prisoners are mainly minori ties, particularly African-Americans, who come from the most disadvantaged corners of our unequal society, cannot be ignored. In 2006, one in nine Black men between the ages of 20 and 34 was serving time. The role of race in this drama is subtle and important, and the racial breakdown is not incidental: prisons both reflect and exacer bate existing racial and class inequalities. Why are there so many African-Americans in prison? It is my belief that such racial dis parity is not mainly due to overt discrimina tory practices by the courts or the police. But that hardly exhausts the moral discus sion. To begin with, let's remember the fact that the very definition of crime is socially constructed: as graphically illustrated by the so-called "war on drugs," much of what is criminal today was not criminal in the past and may not be tomorrow. Let us also frankly admit that a massive, malign indifference to people of color is at work, ['suspect strongly, though it is impos sible to prove to the econometrician's satis faction, that our criminal and penal policies would never have been allowed to expand to the extent that they have if most of the Americans being executed or locked away were White. We must also frankly ask why so many Afri can-American men are committing crimes. Many of the "root causes" have long been acknowledged. Disorganized childhoods, inadequate educations, child abuse, limited employability, and delinquent peers arejust a few of the factors involved. In America, criminal Justice has become a second line of defense, if you will, against individuals whose development has been neglected or undermined by other societal institutions like welfare, education, employment and job training, mental health programs, and other social initiatives. As a result, it is an arena in which social stratification, social stigmas, and uniquely American sociai and racial dramas are reinforced. We should also remember that "punish ment" and "inequality" are intimately linked-that causality runs in both directions. Disparities in punishment reflect socioeco nomic inequalities, but they also help pro duce and reinforce them. Is it not true, for example, that prisons create criminals? As the Rutgers criminolo gist Todd Clear concluded after a review of evidence, the ubiquity of the prison experi ence in some poor urban neighborhoods has had the effect of eliminating the stigma of serving time. On any given day, as many as one in five adult men in these neigh borhoods is behind bars, and as Clear has written, "[T]he cycling of these young men through the prison system has become a central factor determining the social ecol ogy of poor neighborhoods, where there is hardly a family without a son, an uncle ora father who has done time in prison." For people who go to prison, time behind bars almost always also diminishes their odds of living crime-free lives when they get out, by lowering employability, sever ing ties to healthy communal supports, and hardening their own attitudes. When such individuals return to their communi ties, they join many others with the same harsh life experience, often forming or joining gangs. This, in turn, further dimin ishes the opportunities that law-abiding residents in those same neighborhoods have to escape poverty or preserve the often meager value of their property. Huge racial disparities in the incidence of incarceration should therefore come as no surprise. The subordinate status of Black ghetto-dwellers-their social deprivation and spatial isolation in America's cities-puts them at greater risk of embracing dysfunc tional behaviors that lead to incarceration, and then incarceration itself leads to more dysfunction. Put it all together and look at what we have wrought. We have established what looks to the entire world like a racial caste system that leaves millions stigmatized as pariahs, either living behind bars or in conditions of concentrated crime and poverty that breed still more criminality. Why are we doing this? The present American regime of hyper incarceration is said to be necessary in order to secure public safety. But this is not a compelling argument. It is easy to over estimate how much crime is prevented by. locking away a large fraction of the popu lation. Often those who are incarcerated, particularly for selling drugs, are simply replaced by others. There is no shortage of people vying to enter illicit trades, particu larly given how few legal paths to upward mobility exist for most young Black males. The key empirical conclusion of the aca demic literature is that increasing the sever ity of punishment has little, if any, effect in deterring crime. But there is strong evi dence that increasing the certainty of pun ishment has a large deterrent effect. One policy-relevant inference is that lengthy prison sentences, particularly in the form of mandatory minimum-type statutes such as California's Three Strikes Law, are difficult to justify. The ideological justification for the present American prison system also ignores the fact that the broader society is implicated in the existence of these damaged, neglected, feared, and despised communities. People who live in these places are aware that outsiders view them with suspicion and contempt. (I know whereof I speak in this regard, because I am myself a child of the Black ghetto, connected intimately to ghetto-dwellers by the bond of social and psychic affiliation. While in general I am not much given to advertising this fact, it seems appropriate to do so here.)_ The plain historical truth of the matter is that neighborhoods like North Philadel phia, the West Side of Chicago, the East Side of Detroit, and South Central Los Angeles did not come into being by an accident of .nature. As the sociologist Loic Wacquant has argued, these ghettos are man-made, coming into existence and then persisting because the concentration of their residents in such urban enclaves serves the interests of others. As such, the desperate and vile behaviors of some ghetto-dwellers reflect not merely their personal moral deviance, but also the shortcomings of our society as a whole."Justice"operates at multiple levels, both individual and social. Defenders of the current regime put the onus on law-breakers:"lf they didn't do the crimes, they wouldn't have to do the time." Yet a pure ethic of personal responsibility does not and could never justify the current situation. Missing from such an argument is any acknowledgment of social responsibil ity even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. I am not saying that a criminal has no agency in his behavior. Rather, I am argu ing that the larger society is implicated in a criminal's choices because we have acqui esced to social arrangements that work to our benefit and to his detriment-that shape his consciousness and his sense of identity in a way that .the choices he makes (and that we must condemn) are nevertheless compelling to him. Put simply, the structure of our cities with their massive ghettos is a causal factor in the deviancy among those living there. Recognition of this fact has far-reaching implications for the conduct of public policy. What goals are our prisons trying The AC Phoenix to achieve, and how should we weigh the- normous costs they impose on our fellow, innocent citizens? In short, we must think of justice as a com plex feedback loop. The way in which we distribute justice-putting people in pris- on-has consequences, which raise more questions of justice, like how to deal with convicts'families and communities, who are also punished, though they themselves have done nothing wrong. Even if every sentence handed out to every prisoner were itself perfectly fair (an eminently dubi ous proposition), our system would still be amoral, because it punishes innocents. Those who claim on principled arguments that "a man deserves his punishment" are missing the larger picture. A million criminal cases, each rightly decided-each distrib uting justice to a man who deserves his sentetice-still add up to a great and historic wrong. Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Pro fessor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, He is the author of, among other works, "Race, Incarceration, and American Values: The Tanner Lectures." This article, the 10th of an 11-part series on race, is sponsored by the W. K. 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