Mass Incarceration and Racial Inequality

Between 1972 and 2008, the United States prison and jail population rose from roughly 330,000 to over 2.3 million — a sevenfold increase that has no parallel among advanced democracies. Per capita incarceration rates rose to levels roughly five to ten times those of Western European peers and exceeded the peak of the Soviet gulag system in its final decades. This transformation is the empirical referent of the term mass incarceration, and explaining it has been a major task of American sociology since the 1990s.

The first analytic point is that the expansion was not produced by rising crime. Although crime rose from the mid-1960s through the early 1990s and then fell sharply, incarceration continued to grow for two decades after violent crime peaked. The decoupling means that crime rates alone cannot explain the carceral buildup. The proximate causes were policy choices: sentencing enhancements (mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, truth-in-sentencing statutes), changes in prosecutorial practice (a rising share of felony arrests producing prison sentences rather than probation), the war on drugs (which produced a rapid expansion of drug arrests beginning in the 1980s), and parole reform (longer sentences served and higher rates of parole revocation).

Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America (2006) documented the consequences with particular rigor. Western showed that by the early 2000s, roughly one in three Black men without a high-school diploma could expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime. For the 1965-69 birth cohort of Black men lacking high-school credentials, imprisonment by age 34 had become more common than military service or college graduation — indeed, more common than employment in a conventional wage-earning job. Western treated imprisonment not as a marginal event in the lives of a deviant minority but as a life-course transition that had become central to the biographical trajectory of poor Black American men in a way it was not for any other American group or for poor Black men in any earlier period.

The sociological implication is that criminal justice, once analytically separable from the study of stratification, had by the 2000s become a central stratifying institution in American life. Any account of labor markets, families, or racial inequality that ignored the prison would be incomplete. Western's book reoriented the sociology of inequality toward this institution.