Why Mass Incarceration May Have Destroyed Our Communities
On March 9, 2016, Leah Wright Rigueur, Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor of Public Policy, hosted a conversation with Heather Ann Thompson, Professor of Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. They were joined by Elizabeth Hinton, Assistant Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, and Phillip Goff, Visiting Scholar with the Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy. The Ash Center sponsored the event as part of the Race and American Politics seminar series. In this post, HKS student Michael Huggins recaps the panel discussion and explores Thompson’s research on why mass incarceration matters to our cities, economy, and democracy. The panel considered why politicians and policy makers have started to rethink the American carceral state and addressed the barriers that prevent individuals from reentering society and deteriorating police-community relations that further degrade public trust in the government and local institutions.
By Michael Huggins
As civil rights activism moved north to cities like Philadelphia, Rochester, and Harlem, the language of criminality began to seep into the social fabric. Heather Ann Thompson, Professor of Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan, argues that the criminalization of black faces in policy was a response to civil rights activism, and was meant to assure white citizens that they were strong, secure leaders. These policies culminated in the destruction of neighborhoods of color by aggressive law enforcement and mass incarceration.
Policymakers started this policy of mass incarceration before there was even a crime crisis in these communities. The policy choice to incarcerate black and brown people is not a crime imperative. It is a social imperative.
Today, mass incarceration magnifies every issue in this country. Incarcerating individuals and erecting barriers for these individuals upon reentering society, also known as “collateral consequences,” leads to communities in which anyone touched by the carceral state is blocked from contributing positively to the economy. They are prevented from getting many jobs, education, government contracts, and bank loans, amongst other things. These individuals can’t receive federal housing or certain public financial benefits.
Listen to an audio recording of the March 2016 seminar “Why Mass Incarceration Matters to our Cities, Economy, and Democracy”
The Fallout of Mass Incarceration
Increased incarceration and interactions with law enforcement disproportionately impact black people. The many effects of mass incarceration on black communities, according to Thompson, include disproportionate levels of stress, poverty, and infectious diseases; lower levels of education; higher levels of violence; an increased number of orphaned children; and the creation of a class of permanently unemployable Americans.
Residents of neighborhoods with high incarceration rates endure disproportionate level of stress. These neighborhoods also face elevated rates of crime and infectious diseases. The American Journal of Public Health featured an article which discussed treating incarceration as a toxin. After controlling for individual and neighborhood-level factors including history of incarceration, age, gender, race, personal income, trauma exposure, percentage of incomes less than $25,000, and violent crime rate, the study found that individuals living in neighborhoods with prison-admission rates above 5.12 per 1,000 adults were more likely to meet the criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). It is becoming increasingly evident that incarceration has a severe impact on the health of families and communities, and can be seen as a public health issue.
Furthermore, incarceration impacts levels of education and violence. Thompson reported that young people had lower levels of education in areas with high rates of imprisonment. She also noted a rise in violence. According to Thompson, 78% of the incarcerated were likely to recidivate. Mass incarceration makes communities of color significantly less safe. If an increased number of individuals experience severe trauma and stress, education rates are low, and high rates of poverty exist, then communities are more likely to be unstable and violent.
Heather Ann Thompson
Law enforcement has engaged in hyper-punitive policing in response to communities made unstable, in part, by mass incarceration. This form of heavy policing has consequences. For example it further erodes trust that families of color have in the institutions that govern their lives.
Once black defendants are convicted, they are more likely to be sentenced more harshly than white defendants for the same crime. In a 2001 analysis of 77,236 federal cases from 1991 to 1994, even when cases were controlled for the severity of the offense, the defendant’s prior criminal history, and the sentencing tendencies of a particular jurisdiction, black defendants received sentences 5.5 months longer than whites.
Black people live in areas where the courts sentence their neighbors, friends, and family members more harshly and more often. Although many black neighborhoods want to see lower rates of incarceration, black disenfranchisement also mutes the power and voices of the communities that need it the most.
Phillip Goff and Elizabeth Hinton
Can We Move Beyond It?
Thompson claims that mass incarceration preserves its own safety valve. It is difficult for Black Americans to change these policies or elect new politicians because mass incarceration continues to permanently disenfranchise black people. Certain nonviolent offenses and many violent offenses can brand an individual as a felon and strip them of their voting rights. More than a million of these disenfranchised Americans are black. Felony convictions restrict nearly 13% of the country’s black male population from voting.
Many states also use prison bodies to gerrymander, but continue to restrict the voting rights of those bodies. Prison-based gerrymandering happens when state lawmakers draw legislative districts that consist partly or mainly of prison populations, even though inmates are typically denied the right to vote. Prisons can distort political representation in certain areas while simultaneously denying communities from a meaningful voice.
Thompson claims it is possible to move beyond this problem, but “we need to be honest about why we’re here in the first place.” She emphatically exclaimed that, “white folks need to start being vocal” about the truth. White communities need to have a discussion on white privilege. Elizabeth Hinton, Assistant Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University agreed, saying mass incarceration is “deeply rooted in racism.” Phillip Goff, Visiting Scholar with the Malcolm Weiner Center for Social Policy, believes that mass incarceration has rendered an entire class of people invisible. Hinton also responded that “we should tell the story of American history as a story of white supremacy.”
Leah Wright Rigueur
The panel agreed that policymakers must face the dark history that precedes us: mass incarceration was designed to subjugate a class of individuals.
If we want to undo the system and fix the damage that has been done, it will be financially, socially, and culturally expensive. Prisons have long been a band-aid for solving economic problems. Economic downturn in rural areas has triggered cities and towns to prosecute black and brown people for money. The U.S. prison industrial complex system is a business. If we want to disable the business, we must help cities and towns realize that mass incarceration not only wastes resources but also makes communities unsafe.
However, we cannot talk strictly about finances. We need to start educating our children, in kindergarten, about harmful race-based bias in society. But we must also have a conversation with children about why this country is so violent. Mass incarceration may have destroyed the black community, but it will not be the final narrative. It is time to start talking to one another about why mass incarceration matters and how we can empower one another to make incarceration irrelevant once and for all.
Michael Huggins is an MPP1 at the Harvard Kennedy School, a law student at the University of Washington School of Law, and a Research Assistant for Professor Leah Wright Rigueur and the Ash Center’s Race and American Politics series. His interests include prisoners’ rights, the elimination of mass incarceration, and politics.
The Ash Center’s Race and American Politics Series is a multidisciplinary series of seminars and round-table conversations led by Leah Wright Rigueur. Co-sponsored by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, the series features academic, practitioner, and journalistic perspectives from across the nation on the most pressing political and social issues related to race in the United States. Read other posts covering the Race and American Politics seminar series here.
Originally published at www.challengestodemocracy.us.
