Chapter II: Black Poverty (cont.)
Lance Hannon’s and Robert DeFina’s study, “The Impact of Mass Incarceration on Poverty” (2009) determines that, for the nation as a whole, “had mass incarceration not occurred [during the period 1980 to 2004], poverty would have decreased by more than 20%, or about 2.8 percentage points. At the national scale, this translates into several million fewer people in poverty had mass incarceration not occurred …” They go on to note that “it is likely that the effects of mass incarceration on poverty are even greater than those presented in this analysis.” Given the disproportionate number and percentage of African-American men among the incarcerated, the effect on Black poverty of mass incarceration is obviously substantial. How substantial?
The overwhelming proportion of those incarcerated are men. This obvious gender disparity has implications that are perhaps less obvious, but nonetheless crucial in impoverished Black neighborhoods. Professor Western has observed that “… the main effect of the prison boom on gender relations is due precisely to the approximate fact that men go to prison, and women are left in free society to raise families and contend with ex-prisoners returning home after release.” Moreover, before most young men who go to prison do so, they were contributing significantly to their households’ income. This contribution of future prisoners may have been enough to keep those families out of poverty. Once they are incarcerated, that contribution comes to an end and in many, if not most, cases their families fall into poverty. While a man is in jail, his partner (or former partner) and her children are deprived of his income and after he is released, given the employment difficulties of ex-prisoners, they are deprived of his full potential as a worker and thus the income he can provide to his children’s household is severely limited. In most cases, from the moment of arrest (if not before ), his children live in a household with an income below the poverty line. Hannon and DeFina find that this effect, unsurprisingly, is “especially pronounced in areas with a high proportion of non-White residents,” that is, ghettoes, where most Black men of an age to have young children are likely to be incarcerated, on parole or probation. Joseph Stiglitz in his book The Price of Inequality cites a study by Devah Pager showing that “a white man with a criminal record is slightly more likely to be considered for a job than a black man with no criminal past. Thus, on average, being black reduces employment opportunities substantially, and more so with ex-offenders.”
In Alabama, for example, there are 23,600 African-Americans who are incarcerated and 107,500 school age children with incomes below the poverty level. The ratio between those numbers is 22%. The incarceration rate for African-Americans in Alabama is 1,916 per 100,000. States with higher incarceration rates for African-Americans show a higher ratio of incarcerated African-Americans to school-age African-American children living in poverty. Or to put it as simply as possible, other things being equal, the more African-Americans a state incarcerates, the more of its African-American children live in poverty, generation after generation. Extraordinary incarceration rates of African-American men are—at a minimum—associated with extraordinary poverty rates for African-American children. This should seem obvious to policy makers and, for example, district attorneys.
Over half of the Black men in prison have children and nearly as many were living with those children when they were sent to prison. As there are over 800,000 Black men who are incarcerated, it is reasonable to estimate that as many as one-third of the Black families living in poverty are the families of incarcerated men and many more are the families of formerly incarcerated men. According to Professor Pamela Oliver and her associates at the University of Wisconsin, “High rates of Black male imprisonment are associated … with reduced family income, especially in less educated families … Thus, one clear path of effect from imprisonment to child poverty is through the reduction in male incomes due to imprisonment.” This reduction in incomes takes place not only during the years while the father is in prison, but continues for years after his release from prison. Western and Pettit calculate that incarceration reduces earnings for Black men through age 48 by 44%. As the median income for Black males is approximately $40,000, a 44% reduction brings that income to the poverty level. Looked at in another way, from the point of view of the children themselves, Professor Pettit concludes that “… one-quarter of recent cohorts of black children can expect to have a parent imprisoned during their childhood … Among recent cohorts of children of high school dropouts … 62 percent of black children had a parent who went to prison before they reached age seventeen.”
The term “mass incarceration” does not only refer to the total number of incarcerated Black men; it also points to the concentration of incarcerations in high poverty neighborhoods. That concentration results in profoundly negative effects for those neighborhoods as well as impoverishment for the individual families of prisoners. The incarceration of young adult Black males has significant economic consequences not only for the partners (or former partners) of prisoners and ex-prisoners, not only for their own children, but also for the neighborhood and for the wider community. There is, for example, a 9% reduction in average incomes for all Black men, incarcerated or not, attributable to mass incarceration. Hannon and DeFina find that concentrated mass incarceration “disrupts a neighborhood’s informal mechanisms of social control and social support by, for instance, breaking up families, removing purchasing power from the neighborhood, increasing reliance on government support programs, and generally erecting even higher barriers to legitimate development and financial well-being than are currently faced. The detrimental effects of mass incarceration on a community’s collective efficacy may ultimately lead to a type of ‘durable inequality’ where residents cannot escape what might otherwise be only episodic poverty.” This is a marginal effect in the White, non-Hispanic, community, more important in certain Hispanic communities, disastrous in Black communities.
Surveying this situation, Professor Western believes that if “prisons affected no one except the criminals on the inside, they would matter less.
But, after thirty years of penal population growth, the impact of America’s prisons extends far beyond their walls. By zealously punishing law-breakers — including a large new class of nonviolent drug offenders — the criminal justice system at the end of the 1990s drew into its orbit families and whole communities. These most fragile families and neighborhoods were the least equipped to counter any shocks or additional deprivations.”
Specifically, “… the penal system has become so large that it is now an important part of a uniquely American system of social stratification.” The operations of the drug laws, policing and court sentencing practices criminalize a large part of the Black community — criminalize in the sense that they are designated as and treated as criminals by the representatives of the criminal justice system. We have already calculated that this results in the incarceration of approximately 100,000 young adult Black males annually for drug offenses, men who would not have been incarcerated if they had been White. We have seen that in addition, the poorer the community, of any race or ethnicity, the more violent crimes occur there. The more violent crimes, the more long-term incarcerations and as a result the poorer the community. This is not to say that violent crimes do not deserve punishment, but just that for our purposes here we can observe that the increasing impoverishment of American families in the lower tenth or lower fifth income levels accelerates this increasing rate of violent felonies, perhaps as much as do the operations of the drug laws.
Mass incarceration, rooted in a history of African-American slavery and debt peonage, impoverishes Black households, concentrating the Black population in segregated communities with few employment opportunities and extensive opportunities for violence. As a result, the poverty rate for African-Americans is close to triple that for White, non-Hispanics. This extraordinary poverty rate has direct effects on the educational opportunities and achievements of male Black children, which, in turn, affect incarceration rates and income.