Punishment and Inequality in America

by Bruce Western

Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over 2 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.i

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Race, Politics, Social Science, History, Social Justice

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

African American and Hispanic males are disproportionately represented in America's prison population. Most people who read the newspaper know this. But for those who want to know why this is so, and what effect this has on American society in general and the communities from which these men are taken and to which they return, this is the book to read. It's full of data, and none of it is encouraging.

[Kony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Using social-scientific tools and piles of data, Western shows that today's imprisonment policies both spring from and reinforce social inequality. Crime, he says, is part of the context, but not the driving cause of our exploding prison population. The culprits are economics, politics, and vestiges of racism. In turn, the prison boom benefits vested interests and deepens disadvantages mainly for poor African American men.

This book is a good reference. But since it came out, others have built on this thesis and gone further and deeper into the causes and effects named here.

[Joel Radakovich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads similar to a law review article, if that law review article contained all the endnotes in the text. Interesting read with solid conclusions, but getting to those conclusions was painful. Reading text that just describes the charts and tables illustrated above is just unnecessary. In honesty closer to a 5/10.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great scholarly text detailing the development of racial bias in the prison complex.

[FiveBooks]

Professor David Downes has chosen to discuss Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality in America on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject -Crime and Punishment, saying that:

“…The most compelling documentation of the character and consequences of the cataclysmic rise of mass imprisonment in the USA over the past three decades. Western spells out its adverse effects for black and Hispanic communities in particular – four decades ago, they were 30 per cent of the prison population, now they constitute 70 per cent. ‘The basic brute fact of incarceration in the new era of mass imprisonment is that African-Americans are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than whites… The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2004 over 12 per cent of black men aged 25-29 were behind bars, in prison or jail.’ (p3) Over 2.3 million US citizens, mostly male, are in prison on any one day, a figure so huge it conceals substantial levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment by taking them out of the frame..…”

The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/david...

[bri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can you say institutionalized racism? Wow.

[Brandon Burley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bruce Western’s "Punishment and Inequality in America" is a critical examination of how the U.S. penal system exacerbates social inequalities. His research underscores the importance of addressing the root causes of crime, rather than merely responding to its symptoms. In "Reducing Recidivism: A Comprehensive Guide," I build on this idea by focusing on strategies that address these underlying issues, advocating for a more holistic approach to justice that reduces reoffending and supports reintegration into society. Western’s work complements these ideas and is essential for anyone serious about criminal justice reform.