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Race, Incarceration, and American Values
Why stigmatizing and confining a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to all Americans. The United States, home to five percent of the world's population, now houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison inmates. Our incarceration rate—at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising—is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans—vastly disproportionately black and brown—with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.
86 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2008
About the author
Glenn C. Loury
21 books86 followersGlenn C. Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University. An award-winning economic theorist, he is the author of One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America and coauthor of Race, Incarceration, and American Values.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 20, 2019
So, I was pointed to a video of Loury's interview with the Manhattan Institute from February 2019 and really liked what he had to say. In the paper that went along with that talk, he highlights the importance of addressing not only structural barriers, but individual choice options to address poverty, incarceration, and America's innercity ghetto.
I pulled this book from the library to see what else he had to say on the issue and was slightly disappointed by the length (it is not a book, it is an essay with three short essay responses), but still in agreement with most of his points.
Essentially, we DO have to stop arguing that there is no evidence of structural racism in this country and we do have to change the systems that are in place to reinforce this stratification by race and class. However, we cannot refuse to acknowledge (as the black power movement types seem to want to do) that there are individuals in the ghetto that get out; there are people who do better at assimilating and persevere. We have to hold people accountable to for their individual actions while providing them with better and more equatable access to real resources.
My two favorite quotes were: "Society at large is implicated in an individual person's choices because we have acquiesced in—perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds—social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him—an entirely understandable response to circumstance. Closed and bounded social structures—like racially homogeneous urban ghettos—create contexts where 'pathological' and 'dysfunctional' cultural forms emerge, but these forms are neither intrinsic to the people caught in these structures nor independent of the behavior of people who stand outside them.” and
"Thus, the enormous racial disparity in the imposition of social exclusion, civic ex-communication, and lifelong disgrace has come to seem legitimate, even necessary: we fail to see how our failures as a collective body are implicated in this disparity. We shift all the responsibility onto their shoulders, only by irresponsibly—indeed immorally—denying our own. And yet, this entire dynamic has its roots in past unjust acts that were perpetrated on the basis of race.”
After Loury's essay, there were three responses:
Karlan's response focuses mostly on the rates of lifetime disenfranchisement as a result of unequal imprisonment rates and the fact that ex-cons in most states (although this is changing) can never vote again. She also mentions the completely unfair practice as counting non-voting convicts for representation in districts in which they are incarcerated, both because this reduces the representation from their home districts and inflates the representation in the districts that house prisons. This simultaneously increases the political power for those who have a vested interest in incarceration and decreases political power for groups already suffering.
Wacquant's response relates the incarceration rates to the decline of welfare and he further highlights the ways that we have criminalize poverty and used the two systems to repress black men (incarceration) and women (decline of welfare). I wasn't in entire agreement with some of his statments.
Shelby's response puts greater pressure on the structural causes of difference and says that rather than ask for parity (which would just led to more whites incarceration), we should look for better options to be provided through social welfare.
Ultimately, this is another thread in an important conversation about understanding how to move forward as a society that actually espouses the values of "equal opportunity".
I pulled this book from the library to see what else he had to say on the issue and was slightly disappointed by the length (it is not a book, it is an essay with three short essay responses), but still in agreement with most of his points.
Essentially, we DO have to stop arguing that there is no evidence of structural racism in this country and we do have to change the systems that are in place to reinforce this stratification by race and class. However, we cannot refuse to acknowledge (as the black power movement types seem to want to do) that there are individuals in the ghetto that get out; there are people who do better at assimilating and persevere. We have to hold people accountable to for their individual actions while providing them with better and more equatable access to real resources.
My two favorite quotes were: "Society at large is implicated in an individual person's choices because we have acquiesced in—perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds—social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him—an entirely understandable response to circumstance. Closed and bounded social structures—like racially homogeneous urban ghettos—create contexts where 'pathological' and 'dysfunctional' cultural forms emerge, but these forms are neither intrinsic to the people caught in these structures nor independent of the behavior of people who stand outside them.” and
"Thus, the enormous racial disparity in the imposition of social exclusion, civic ex-communication, and lifelong disgrace has come to seem legitimate, even necessary: we fail to see how our failures as a collective body are implicated in this disparity. We shift all the responsibility onto their shoulders, only by irresponsibly—indeed immorally—denying our own. And yet, this entire dynamic has its roots in past unjust acts that were perpetrated on the basis of race.”
After Loury's essay, there were three responses:
Karlan's response focuses mostly on the rates of lifetime disenfranchisement as a result of unequal imprisonment rates and the fact that ex-cons in most states (although this is changing) can never vote again. She also mentions the completely unfair practice as counting non-voting convicts for representation in districts in which they are incarcerated, both because this reduces the representation from their home districts and inflates the representation in the districts that house prisons. This simultaneously increases the political power for those who have a vested interest in incarceration and decreases political power for groups already suffering.
Wacquant's response relates the incarceration rates to the decline of welfare and he further highlights the ways that we have criminalize poverty and used the two systems to repress black men (incarceration) and women (decline of welfare). I wasn't in entire agreement with some of his statments.
Shelby's response puts greater pressure on the structural causes of difference and says that rather than ask for parity (which would just led to more whites incarceration), we should look for better options to be provided through social welfare.
Ultimately, this is another thread in an important conversation about understanding how to move forward as a society that actually espouses the values of "equal opportunity".
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July 11, 2023Goodreads lied, this book isn't 96 pages, its like 50. I will read a much longer book to compensate for my sins, fear not.
April 28, 2016
For such a slim volume, it has a lot to say on race and incarceration. I would recommend reading this in tandem with Uprooting Racism and The New Jim Crow.
February 6, 2017
A brief and lucid reminder of racial inequality and its human costs.
Written and published before the rise of BLM, a movement which Loury has since been critical of, there is much the current debate about race relations could learn from this introductory framing of incarceration in America and its moral (or immoral) underpinnings.
Loury begins by highlighting the stark rise in 'punitiveness' of American society, defined simply as the ratio between inmates and crime rates. A dramatic rise in the former, with steady falls in the latter (post-peak in 1992), indicates that indeed American society has turned to using the stick as the preferred apparatus of social reform. A narrative is then neatly woven to ask and answer whether this has disproportionately affected Black America. A resounding 'yes' follows.
With help from contributing authors, this dramatic escalation of incarceration is linked to factors like the intentionally racialised hammer that has been the "War on Drugs", with its correlated inequalities in the application of the justice system, such as mandatory minimums and voter disenfranchisement laws. Changing economic circumstances then also left a marginalised group, taking its first steps in the light of liberation after the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s, in a racially segregated community, necessarily restratified now also by class and moral status: the urban ghetto.
The upshot is this: the cycle of incarceration, and its effect on creating cultural pathologies that are themselves "criminogenic", cannot be ignored if America (inter alia) is ever to become a fully just society.
(The only downside is the chapter by Loïc Wacquant, which I found full of platitudinal 'deepities', and no discernible narrative.)
Written and published before the rise of BLM, a movement which Loury has since been critical of, there is much the current debate about race relations could learn from this introductory framing of incarceration in America and its moral (or immoral) underpinnings.
Loury begins by highlighting the stark rise in 'punitiveness' of American society, defined simply as the ratio between inmates and crime rates. A dramatic rise in the former, with steady falls in the latter (post-peak in 1992), indicates that indeed American society has turned to using the stick as the preferred apparatus of social reform. A narrative is then neatly woven to ask and answer whether this has disproportionately affected Black America. A resounding 'yes' follows.
With help from contributing authors, this dramatic escalation of incarceration is linked to factors like the intentionally racialised hammer that has been the "War on Drugs", with its correlated inequalities in the application of the justice system, such as mandatory minimums and voter disenfranchisement laws. Changing economic circumstances then also left a marginalised group, taking its first steps in the light of liberation after the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s, in a racially segregated community, necessarily restratified now also by class and moral status: the urban ghetto.
The upshot is this: the cycle of incarceration, and its effect on creating cultural pathologies that are themselves "criminogenic", cannot be ignored if America (inter alia) is ever to become a fully just society.
(The only downside is the chapter by Loïc Wacquant, which I found full of platitudinal 'deepities', and no discernible narrative.)
January 22, 2024
Short lecture/essay that raises broad questions of ‘justice’ vis-a-vis incarceration, specifically disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, leading to stigmatization, destruction of social networks, and indifference on the part of the broader public given the identity of those churned through prison. Loury approaches the manner at a high level, abstracting from questions of whether there exists bias in the application of criminal justice as not being central to his point (as the question is ultimately one of distribution).
Washed away in the theorizing is consideration of the costs of crime (the costs to social networks, to opportunities for development, etc).
As the other essayists note, it is peculiar to focus on incarceration when calling for Americans to regard the welfare of African American men. There are points-in-time where care is needed: care is needed in the womb; care is needed in the crib; care is needed at school and on the way to school; care is needed at home during adolescence. When care breaks down and contributes to criminal proclivity, is the just answer to deny justice to the victim (or potential victims) by enacting a care regime that mitigates criminal sanction because social connections were insufficient?
Washed away in the theorizing is consideration of the costs of crime (the costs to social networks, to opportunities for development, etc).
As the other essayists note, it is peculiar to focus on incarceration when calling for Americans to regard the welfare of African American men. There are points-in-time where care is needed: care is needed in the womb; care is needed in the crib; care is needed at school and on the way to school; care is needed at home during adolescence. When care breaks down and contributes to criminal proclivity, is the just answer to deny justice to the victim (or potential victims) by enacting a care regime that mitigates criminal sanction because social connections were insufficient?
October 11, 2010
Loury's work on this subject is essential for anyone interested in prisons or racial disparity in society. Reading his essay is like having cold water splashed in your face. Basically he presents the idea that the excessive and racially imbalanced rate of incarceration in the US is a collective moral failure on the part of middle/upper class citizens. Anybody that benefits from social policies that lead to the creation of crimogenic conditions in inner city neighborhoods (which is everyone not in those neighborhoods, basically) is implicated. Policies should be based on what we would want for ourselves should we live in those areas, or should we be incarcerated. It's really a pretty straightforward concept, and to me it was very convincing, maybe life changing. I can't see many people being convinced of his argument, though, because it requires a lot of soul searching and an almost complete rejection of ideas you have probably clung to for a very long time. If you read a little about Loury's background (there are good profiles of him in NYTBR circa 2002 and New Yorker a little earlier) you find that's precisely what it took for him to arrive at these ideas. In the 80s he was a leading black conservative intellectual and espoused the idea that poor urban blacks are responsible for their situation. It took some personal hard times and spending time in urban neighborhoods for him to come to this complete reversal. In a way his thinking now stands apart from both liberal and conservative points of view on this subject. More typical liberal thinking can be seen in the response essays to Loury's in this volume. They tend to focus on small policy issues like less harsh sentencing for nonviolent offenders (which I see as a code for legalizing marijuana, therefore pandering to the self-interest of the middle class and not addressing any of the deeper underlying problems) or reducing voting disenfranchisement of ex-felons (not addressing a general political detachment). Loic Wacquant's essay is helpful in pointing out that all poor people are being stigmatized/criminalized, and not just blacks. Loury's ideas arent practical for short-term policy changes; he's really advocating a long-term gradual change in values based on a close look at the way we're living our lives and the effect its having on others.
I would reduce my rating to 4 stars for those thinking of buying the book, because it's only 86 pages long. Try to get it through your library. Slightly different versions of Loury's essay are available elsewhere, as well.
I would reduce my rating to 4 stars for those thinking of buying the book, because it's only 86 pages long. Try to get it through your library. Slightly different versions of Loury's essay are available elsewhere, as well.
September 15, 2011
Teensy yet potent summary of the sad history, culture/politics, and economics of punitive crime policies in America. At the end, it adds a philosophical/moral dimension that's lacking, or underdeveloped, in most other accounts. Partly because the book's so tiny, it doesn't expand on the "values" part for very long, to my regret. Otherwise, it's a swift and accurate overview.
Loury's portion is followed by shorter pieces by 2 scholars, including Loic Wacquant. The Wacquant sampler is the best part of the book; he has a more nuanced and penetrating take on how economics overshadows race in the penal system's monstrous expansion.
Loury's portion is followed by shorter pieces by 2 scholars, including Loic Wacquant. The Wacquant sampler is the best part of the book; he has a more nuanced and penetrating take on how economics overshadows race in the penal system's monstrous expansion.
October 1, 2009
It's a tiny book, but really good for an intro to prisons and incarceration that isn't quite as extreme as Angela Davis. Plus, it's got a short essay by Loic Wacquant, who is really awesome.
March 11, 2021
This book is an interesting introduction to racialized incarceration issues. The most interesting part of this treatise is Loury's explanation of the damage that is done to communities when a high proportion of their men are incarcerated. I also found Loury's use of moral reasoning helpful, as he effectively showed the lack of justice inherent to America's system of incarceration. Nothing in this book was particularly groundbreaking to me, perhaps because this is such a prescient issue now, so the knowledge contained in this treatise is more common knowledge than it was in 2006. I like that Loury merely exposes the unjustness of this particular system rather than proposing radical changes to society as other authors do. This text differs from those such as 'Are Prisons Obsolete' in that it seeks racial parity in systems and more of an emphasis on rehabilitation, rather than seeking to do away with the whole justice system. I liked that the copy of this treatise that I read included responses by other authors at the end of the book, so I could see the perceived shortcomings of Loury's views and get a grasp of alternate ways to view the issue of hyper-incarceration. Interesting book, although it doesn't exactly present any new ideas compared to similar works in the genre.
February 18, 2021
Short and interesting. A bit outdated and I believe Glenn has changed his tune a bit since.
September 11, 2021
... but why no bibliographic references, y'all?
December 24, 2016
Good digestible work
I enjoyed the multiple authors' contributions and the dialogue reading such a work impresses upon you. Much of the language was vague language, but overall quite good.
I enjoyed the multiple authors' contributions and the dialogue reading such a work impresses upon you. Much of the language was vague language, but overall quite good.
December 9, 2012
too short of a book. the "new jim crow" i expect to be longer a more in-depth
July 30, 2015
Powerfull
Having listen to Lowry I can hear his voice in my head while reading this book. A tough subject that is getting increasingly more relevant.
Having listen to Lowry I can hear his voice in my head while reading this book. A tough subject that is getting increasingly more relevant.
January 2, 2009
Apparently race and incarceration are connected. Who knew?
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews