Sources for “Why Are There So Many People in Prison? How America Created Mass Incarceration”
The Gravel Institute
The overall thesis of the article was influenced by “The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration,” by John Clegg and Adaner Usmani in Catalyst (Fall 2019). Without a doubt, this is the best short analysis of mass incarceration available. Useful additional sources include Carceral Capitalism (MIT Press), by Jackie Wang, and Golden Gulag (University of California Press) by Ruth Wilson Gilmore; an interesting interview with Gilmore on the themes of the latter book is available through Verso.
The numbers on unemployment rates for college graduates and non-college graduates are drawn from “Education and demographics: how do they affect unemployment rates?” by Wayne J. Howe in the Monthly Labor Review (January 1988). However, these numbers can be deceiving. For one, Howe looks at high school graduates, when a significant number of workers during the period had not finished high school. In addition, it looks at the unemployment rate, but this measure alone does not tell us much about the health of the labor market. As Aaron Benanav notes in his essay “Automation and the Future of Work—1” for New Left Review, “the fall in labour demand manifests not as mass unemployment, but rather as mass under-employment.”
For full numbers on the number of incarcerated people, see “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020,” a publication of the Prison Policy Initiative. The statistics on Black men born between 1965 and 1969 are drawn from the Clegg and Usmani essay; the statistics on lifetime incarceration rates for people without high school diplomas are drawn from Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” in American Sociological Review (2004).
On the finding that prisons tend to make people more likely to commit crime, not less, see David J. Harding, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, Anh P. Nguyen, Shawn D. Bushway, and Ingrid A. Binswanger, “A Natural Experiment Study of the Effects of Imprisonment on Violence in the Community,” in Nature Human Behaviour (2019); An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse, by Jens Soering (Lantern Publishing); and “Recidivism and Reentry,” a compilation of studies by the Prison Policy Initiative.