Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- About the Author -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Learning About Life After Prison -- Chapter 3. Transitions -- Chapter 4. Human Frailty -- Chapter 5. Lifetimes of Violence -- Chapter 6. Income -- Chapter 7. Family -- Chapter 8. Back to Jail -- Chapter 9. Women -- Chapter 10. Race and Racism -- Chapter 11. Criminal Justice as Social Justice -- Notes -- References -- Index

Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over two 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 dropouts 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 reductions in crime in the 1990s, Western shows that the swelling prison population only explains one-tenth of the fall in crime, and 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

Citizenship is a public declaration of equality. Regardless of the inequalities that internally divide a society, citizens enjoy a common set of rights -- perhaps to protest or vote or run for office. The content of citizenship rights has varied greatly across time and place. In the stylized history of T. H. Marshall (1950/1992), rights to speech and access to the courts were among the earliest pillars of citizenship, followed by rights to the franchise, and finally by rights to social welfare with the emergence of modern social policy. Marshall's account of the historical development of citizenship describes a virtuous circle in which the pool of citizens grows as the rights of citizenship become more extensive. Civil rights empower citizens to press for voting rights. Once the male working class was enfranchised in Europe, unions and labor parties set about expanding social rights embodied in the welfare state. In Marshall's account, universal education was the key breakthrough, but safety net programs, national health care, and public pensions could also be added to the list. The articles in this volume describe how mass incarceration in the United States has reconfigured civic life. The virtuous circle of citizenship -- never fully developed in the United States to begin with -- has been interrupted. The punitive turn in criminal justice policy amounts to a transformation of the quality of citizenship, in which the state plays an active role in deepening, not reducing, inequality. The virtuous circle turned vicious. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]