bruce western & becky pettit incarceration & social inequality · source: becky pettit,...

In the last few decades, the institution-al contours of American social inequal-ity have been transformed by the rapidgrowth in the prison and jail population.1America’s prisons and jails have pro-duced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by theshared experience of incarceration,crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As an outcast group, the men and women in our penal insti-tutions have little access to the socialmobility available to the mainstream.Social and economic disadvantage, crystallizing in penal con!nement, is sustained over the life course andtransmitted from one generation to the next. This is a profound institu-tionalized inequality that has renewedrace and class disadvantage. Yet thescale and empirical details tell a storythat is largely unknown.

Though the rate of incarceration is historically high, perhaps the most im-portant social fact is the inequality inpenal con!nement. This inequality pro-duces extraordinary rates of incarcera-tion among young African Americanmen with no more than a high schooleducation. For these young men, born

since the mid-1970s, serving time inprison has become a normal life event.

The influence of the penal system onsocial and economic disadvantage canbe seen in the economic and family livesof the formerly incarcerated. The socialinequality produced by mass incarcer-ation is sizable and enduring for threemain reasons: it is invisible, it is cumu-lative, and it is intergenerational. Theinequality is invisible in the sense thatinstitutionalized populations commonlylie outside our of!cial accounts of eco-nomic well-being. Prisoners, thoughdrawn from the lowest rungs in society,appear in no measures of poverty or un-employment. As a result, the full extentof the disadvantage of groups with highincarceration rates is underestimated.The inequality is cumulative because thesocial and economic penalties that flowfrom incarceration are accrued by thosewho already have the weakest economicopportunities. Mass incarceration thusdeepens disadvantage and foreclosesmobility for the most marginal in socie-ty. Finally, carceral inequalities are inter-generational, affecting not just thosewho go to prison and jail but their fam-ilies and children, too.

The scale of incarceration is measuredby a rate that records the fraction of the

8 Dædalus Summer 2010

Bruce Western & Becky Pettit

Incarceration & social inequality

© 2010 by the American Academy of Arts& Sciences

Dædalus Summer 2010 9

population in prison or jail on an aver-age day. From 1980 to 2008, the U.S. in-carceration rate climbed from 221 to 762 per 100,000. In the previous !ve de-cades, from the 1920s through the mid-1970s, the scale of punishment in Amer-ica had been stable at around 100 per100,000. Though the incarceration rate is now nearly eight times its historicaverage, the scale of punishment todaygains its social force from its unequaldistribution.

Like criminal activity, prisons and jails are overwhelmingly a male affair.Men account for 90 percent of the pris-on population and a similar propor-tion of those in local jails. The incar-ceration rate has been growing fasteramong women in recent decades, butthe social impact of mass incarcerationlies in the gross asymmetry of commu-nity and family attachment. Women re-main in their communities raising chil-dren, while men confront the possibili-ty of separation through incarceration.2Age intensi!es these effects: incarcera-tion rates are highest for those in theirtwenties and early thirties. These are key years in the life course, when mostmen are establishing a pathway throughadulthood by leaving school, getting ajob, and starting a family. These years ofearly adulthood are important not justfor a man’s life trajectory, but also forthe family and children that he helpssupport.

Age and sex are the staples of demo-graphic analysis, and the relative youthof the largely male incarcerated popula-tion foreshadows much about the effectsof mass incarceration. Still, it is the pro-found race and class disparities in incar-ceration that produce the new class ofsocial outsiders. African Americans havealways been incarcerated at higher ratesthan whites, at least since statistics wereavailable from the late nineteenth centu-

ry. The extent of racial disparity, how-ever, has varied greatly over the past century, following a roughly inverserelationship to the slow incorporation of African Americans as full citizens inAmerican society. In the late nineteenthcentury, U.S. Census data show that theincarceration rate among African Amer-icans was roughly twice that of whites.The demographic erosion of Jim Crowthrough the migration of Southern Afri-can Americans to the North increasedracial disparity in incarceration throughthe !rst half of the twentieth century.(Racial disparities in incarceration havealways been higher in the North thanthe South.) By the late 1960s, at the ze-nith of civil rights activism, the racialdisparity had climbed to its contempo-rary level, leaving African Americansseven times more likely to be in prisonor jail than whites.

Class inequalities in incarceration arereflected in the very low educational lev-el of those in prison and jail. The legiti-mate labor market opportunities for menwith no more than a high school educa-tion have deteriorated as the prison pop-ulation has grown, and prisoners them-selves are drawn overwhelmingly fromthe least educated. State prisoners aver-age just a tenth grade education, andabout 70 percent have no high schooldiploma.3

Disparities of race, class, gender, andage have produced extraordinary rates of incarceration among young AfricanAmerican men with little schooling. Fig-ure 1 shows prison and jail incarcera-tion rates for men under age thirty-!vein 1980, at the beginning of the prisonboom, and in 2008, after three decadesof rising incarceration rates. The !gurereports incarceration separately forwhites, Latinos, and African Americansand separately for three levels of educa-tion. Looking at men with a college edu-

Incarcer-ation &socialinequality


cation, we see that incarceration ratestoday have barely increased since 1980.Incarceration rates have increased amongAfrican Americans and whites who havecompleted high school. Among youngAfrican American men with high schooldiplomas, about one in ten is in prisonor jail.

Most of the growth in incarcerationrates is concentrated at the very bottom,among young men with very low lev-els of education. In 1980, around 10 per-cent of young African American menwho dropped out of high school were inprison or jail. By 2008, this incarcerationrate had climbed to 37 percent, an aston-ishing level of institutionalization giventhat the average incarceration rate in thegeneral population was 0.76 of 1 percent.

Even among young white dropouts, theincarceration rate had grown remarkably,with around one in eight behind bars by2008. The signi!cant growth of incarcer-ation rates among the least educated re-flects increasing class inequality in in-carceration through the period of theprison boom.

These incarceration rates provide only a snapshot at a point in time. Wecan also examine the lifetime chance of incarceration–that is, the chancethat someone will go to prison at somepoint in his or her life. This cumulativerisk of incarceration is important if serv-ing time in prison confers an enduringstatus that affects life chances after re-turning to free society. The lifetime riskof imprisonment describes how many

Figure 1Percentage of Men Aged Twenty to Thirty-Four in Prison or Jail, by Race/Ethnicity and Educa-tion, 1980 and 2008

Source: Becky Pettit, Bryan Sykes, and Bruce Western, “Technical Report on Revised Population Estimates and nlsy79 Analysis Tables for the Pew Public Safety and Mobility Project” (Harvard University, 2009).

BruceWestern &Becky Pettit on massincarcer-ation


people are at risk of these diminished life chances.

We calculated the cumulative chanceof imprisonment for two birth cohorts,one born just after World War II, from1945 to 1949, and another born from 1975to 1979 (Table 1). For each cohort, wecalculated the chances of imprisonment,not jail incarceration. Prisons are thedeep end of the criminal justice system,now incarcerating people for an averageof twenty-eight months for a felony con-viction. While there are about ten mil-lion admissions to local jails each year–for those awaiting trial or serving shortsentences–around seven hundred thou-sand prisoners are now admitted annu-ally to state and federal facilities.

These cumulative chances of impris-onment are calculated up to age thirty-four. For most of the population, thisrepresents the lifetime likelihood ofserving prison time. For the older post-war cohort who reached their mid-thir-

ties at the end of the 1970s, about one in ten African American men servedtime in prison. For the younger cohortborn from 1975 to 1979, the lifetime riskof imprisonment for African Americanmen had increased to one in four. Pris-on time has become a normal life eventfor African American men who havedropped out of high school. Fully 68 percent of these men born since themid-1970s have prison records. Thehigh rate of incarceration has redrawnthe pathway through young adulthood.The main sources of upward mobility for African American men–namely, military service and a college degree–are signi!cantly less common than aprison record. For the !rst generationsgrowing up in the post–civil rights era,the prison now looms as a signi!cantinstitutional influence on life chances.

The ubiquity of penal con!nement inthe lives of young African American men

Table 1Cumulative Risk of Imprisonment by Age Thirty to Thirty-Four for Men Born from 1945 to 1949and 1975 to 1979, by Educational Attainment and Race/Ethnicity

*Denotes completed high school or equivalency. Source: Becky Pettit, Bryan Sykes, and Bruce Western, “Technical Report on Revised Population Estimates and nlsy79 Analysis Tables for the Pew Public Safety and Mobility Project” (Harvard University, 2009).

High School High School/All Dropouts ged* College

1945–1949 cohortWhite 1.4 3.8 1.5 0.4Black 10.4 14.7 11.0 5.3

Latino 2.8 4.1 2.9 1.1

1975–1979 cohortWhite 5.4 28.0 6.2 1.2Black 26.8 68.0 21.4 6.6

Latino 12.2 19.6 9.2 3.4



with little schooling is historically novel,emerging only in the last decade. How-ever, this new reality is only half the sto-ry of understanding the signi!cance ofmass incarceration in America. The oth-er half of the story concerns the effectsof incarceration on social and economicinequality. The inequalities produced bycontemporary patterns of incarcerationhave three characteristics: the inequal-ities associated with incarceration areinvisible to our usual accounting of theeconomic well-being of the population;the inequality is cumulative, deepeningthe disadvantage of the most marginalmen in society; and !nally, the inequali-ty is intergenerational, transmitting thepenalties of a prison record from onegeneration to the next. Because the char-acteristic inequalities produced by theAmerican prison boom are invisible, cu-mulative, and intergenerational, they areextremely enduring, sustained over life-times and passed through families.

Invisible Inequality. The inequality cre-ated by incarceration is often invisible to the mainstream of society because in-carceration is concentrated and segrega-tive. We have seen that steep racial andclass disparities in incarceration haveproduced a generation of social outlierswhose collective experience is whollydifferent from the rest of American so-ciety. The extreme concentration of in-carceration rates is compounded by theobviously segregative function of the pe-nal system, which often relocates peopleto far-flung facilities distant from theircommunities and families. As a result,people in prison and jail are disconnect-ed from the basic institutions–house-holds and the labor market–that domi-nate our common understanding andmeasurement of the population. Thesegregation and social concentration of incarceration thus help conceal itseffects. This fact is particularly impor-

tant for public policy because in assess-ing the social and economic well-being of the population, the incarcerated frac-tion is frequently overlooked, and in-equality is underestimated as a result.

The idea of invisible inequality is il-lustrated by considering employmentrates as they are conventionally mea-sured by the Current Population Sur-vey, the large monthly labor force sur-vey conducted by the Census Bureau.For groups that are weakly attached tothe labor market, like young men withlittle education, economic status is oftenmeasured by the employment-to-popu-lation ratio. This !gure, more expansivethan the unemployment rate, counts asjobless those who have dropped out ofthe labor market altogether. The CurrentPopulation Survey is drawn on a sampleof households, so those who are institu-tionalized are not included in the survey-based description of the population.

Figure 2 shows the employment-to-population ratio for African Americanmen under age thirty-!ve who have not completed high school. Conven-tional estimates of the employment rate show that by 2008, around 40 per-cent of African American male drop-outs were employed. These estimates,based on the household survey, fail tocount that part of the population inprison or jail. Once prison and jail in-mates are included in the populationcount (and among the jobless), we seethat employment among young Afri-can American men with little school-ing fell to around 25 percent by 2008.Indeed, by 2008 these men were morelikely to be locked up than employed.

Cumulative Inequality. Serving timein prison or jail diminishes social andeconomic opportunities. As we haveseen, these diminished opportunities are found among those already mostsocioeconomically disadvantaged. A



burgeoning research literature examin-ing the economic effects of incarcera-tion !nds that incarceration is associat-ed with reduced earnings and employ-ment.4

We analyzed panel data from the Na-tional Longitudinal Survey of Youth(nlsy), one of the few surveys that fol-lows respondents over a long period oftime and that interviews incarceratedrespondents in prison. The nlsy beganin 1979, when its panel of respondentswas aged fourteen to twenty-one; it com-pleted its latest round of interviews in2006. Matching our population estimatesof incarceration, one in !ve AfricanAmerican male respondents in the nlsy

has been interviewed at some point be-tween 1979 and 2006 while incarcerated,compared to 5 percent of whites and 12percent of Latino respondents. Analysisof the nlsy showed that serving time inprison was associated with a 40 percentreduction in earnings and with reducedjob tenure, reduced hourly wages, andhigher unemployment.

The negative effects of incarceration,even among men with very poor eco-nomic opportunities to begin with, arerelated to the strong negative percep-tions employers have of job seekers withcriminal records. Devah Pager’s experi-mental research has studied these em-ployer perceptions by sending pairs of

Figure 2Employment to Population Ratio, African American Men Aged Twenty to Thirty-Four with Lessthan Twelve Years of Schooling, 1980 to 2008




fake job seekers to apply for real jobs.5

In each pair, one of the job applicantswas randomly assigned a résumé indi-cating a criminal record (a parole of!ceris listed as a reference), and the “crimi-nal” applicant was instructed to checkthe box on the job application indicat-ing he had a criminal record. A criminalrecord was found to reduce callbacksfrom prospective employers by around50 percent, an effect that was larger forAfrican Americans than for whites.

Incarceration may reduce economicopportunities in several ways. The con-ditions of imprisonment may promotehabits and behaviors that are poorly suit-ed to the routines of regular work. Timein prison means time out of the laborforce, depleting the work experience ofthe incarcerated compared to their non-incarcerated counterparts. The stigma ofa criminal conviction may also repel em-ployers who prefer job applicants withclean records. Pager’s audit study offersclear evidence for the negative effects ofcriminal stigma. Employers, fearing le-gal liability or even just unreliability, areextremely reluctant to hire workers withcriminal convictions.

A simple picture of the poor economicopportunities of the formerly incarcerat-ed is given by the earnings mobility ofmen going to prison compared to otherdisadvantaged groups. The nlsy datacan be used to study earnings mobilityover several decades. We calculated thechances that a poor man in the lowest!fth of the earnings distribution in 1986would move up and out of the lowest!fth by 2006. Among low-income menwho are not incarcerated, nearly two-thirds are upwardly mobile by 2006 (Fig-ure 3). Another group in the nlsy hasvery low levels of cognitive ability, scor-ing in the bottom quintile of the ArmedForces Qualifying Test, the standardizedtest used for military service. Among

low-income men with low scores on thetest, only 41 percent are upwardly mobile.Upward mobility is even less commonamong low-income high school dropouts.Still, we observe the least mobility of allamong men who were incarcerated atsome point between 1986 and 2006. Forthese men, only one in four rises out ofthe bottom quintile of the earnings dis-tribution.

Intergenerational Inequality. Finally, theeffects of the prison boom extend alsoto the families of those who are incarcer-ated. Through the prism of researchon poverty, scholars !nd that the fami-ly life of the disadvantaged has becomedramatically more complex and unsta-ble over the last few decades. Divorceand nonmarital births have contributedsigni!cantly to rising rates of single par-enthood, and these changes in Americanfamily structure are concentrated amonglow-income mothers. As a consequence,poor children regularly grow up, at leastfor a time, with a single mother and, atdifferent times, with a variety of adultmales in their households.

High rates of parental incarcerationlikely add to the instability of familylife among poor children. Over half ofall prisoners have children under the age of eighteen, and about 45 percent of those parents were living with theirchildren at the time they were sent toprison. About two-thirds of prisonersstay in regular contact with their chil-dren either by phone, mail, or visita-tion.6 Ethnographer Megan Comfortpaints a vivid picture of the effects ofmen’s incarceration on the women and families in their lives. She quotes a prisoner at San Quentin State Prisonin California:

Nine times out of ten it’s the woman[maintaining contact with prisoners].Why? Because your homeboys, or your



friends, if you’re in that lifestyle, most the time they’re gonna be sittin’ rightnext to your ass in prison. . . . The males,they don’t really participate like a lot of females in the lives of the incarcerat-ed. . . . They don’t deal with it, like !rst of all they don’t like to bring to reality that you’re in prison; they don’t wannathink about that . . . Or some of ’em justdon’t care. So the male’s kinda like wipedout of there, so that puts all the burden onthe woman.7

Partly because of the burdens of in-carceration on women who are left toraise families in free society, incarcera-tion is strongly associated with divorceand separation. In addition to the forcedseparation of incarceration, the post-release effects on economic opportuni-

ties leave formerly incarcerated parentsless equipped to provide !nancially fortheir children. New research also showsthat the children of incarcerated parents,particularly the boys, are at greater riskof developmental delays and behavioralproblems.8

Against this evidence for the negativeeffects of incarceration, we should weighthe gains to public safety obtained byseparating violent or otherwise antiso-cial men from their children and part-ners. Domestic violence is much morecommon among the formerly incarcer-ated compared to other disadvantagedmen. Survey data indicate that formerlyincarcerated men are about four timesmore likely to assault their domestic part-ners than men who have never been in-carcerated. Though the relative risk is

Figure 3Twenty-Year Earnings Mobility among Men in the Bottom Quintile of Earnings Distribution in 1986, National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (nlsy) Men

afqt stands for Armed Forces Qualifying Test. Source: Becky Pettit, Bryan Sykes, and Bruce Western, “Technical Report on Revised Population Estimates and nlsy79 Analysis Tables for the Pew Public Safety and Mobility Project” (Harvard University, 2009).



very high, around 90 percent of the part-ners of formerly incarcerated report nodomestic violence at all.

The scale of the effects of parental in-carceration on children can be revealedsimply by statistics showing the numberof children with a parent in prison orjail. Among white children in 1980, only0.4 of 1 percent had an incarcerated par-ent; by 2008 this !gure had increased to1.75 percent. Rates of parental incarcer-ation are roughly double among Latinochildren, with 3.5 percent of children hav-ing a parent locked up by 2008. AmongAfrican American children, 1.2 million,or about 11 percent, had a parent incar-cerated by 2008 (Figure 4).

The spectacular growth in the Ameri-can penal system over the last three de-cades was concentrated in a small seg-ment of the population, among youngminority men with very low levels of ed-ucation. By the early 2000s, prison timewas a common life event for this group,and today more than two-thirds of Afri-can American male dropouts are expect-ed to serve time in state or federal pris-on. These demographic contours of massimprisonment have created a new classof social outsiders whose relationship tothe state and society is wholly differentfrom the rest of the population.

Social marginality is deepened by theinequalities produced by incarceration.Workers with prison records experiencesigni!cant declines in earnings and em-ployment. Parents in prison are likely todivorce or separate, and through the con-tagious effects of the institution, theirchildren are in some degree “prisonized,”exposed to the routines of prison lifethrough visitation and the parole super-vision of their parents. Yet much of thisreality remains hidden from view. In so-cial life, for all but those whose incarcer-ation rates are highest, prisons are exotic

institutions unknown to the social main-stream. Our national data systems, andthe social facts they produce, are struc-tured around normative domestic andeconomic life, systematically excludingprison inmates.

Thus we de!ne carceral inequalitiesas invisible, cumulative, and intergener-ational. Because they are so deeply con-centrated in a small disadvantaged frac-tion of the population, the social andeconomic effects of incarceration createa discrete social group whose collectiveexperience is so distinctive yet unknownthat their disadvantage remains largelybeyond the apprehension of public pol-icy or public conversation. The redraw-ing of American social inequality by massincarceration amounts to a contractionof citizenship–a contraction of that pop-ulation that enjoys, in T. H. Marshall’swords, “full membership in society.”9

Inequality of this kind threatens to beself-sustaining. Socioeconomic disad-vantage, crime, and incarceration in thecurrent generation undermine the sta-bility of family life and material supportfor children. As adults, these childrenwill be at greater risk of diminished lifechances and criminal involvement, andat greater risk of incarceration as a result.

Skeptics will respond that these arefalse issues of social justice: the pris-on boom substantially reduced crime,and criminals should forfeit their socie-tal membership in any case. The crime-reducing effects of incarceration arehotly debated, however. Empirical esti-mates of the effects of incarceration oncrime vary widely, and often they turn on assumptions that are dif!cult to testdirectly. Researchers have focused on the sharp decline in U.S. crime ratesthrough the 1990s, studying the influ-ence of rising prison populations. Con-servative estimates attribute about one-tenth of the 1990s crime decline to the



growth in imprisonment rates.10 Thoughthe precise impact of incarceration oncrime is uncertain, there is broad agree-ment that additional imprisonment athigh rates of incarceration does little to reduce crime. The possibility of im-proved public safety through increasedincarceration is by now exhausted.

Studies of the effects of incarcerationon crime also focus only on the shortterm. Indeed, because of the negativeeffects of incarceration on economicopportunities and family life, incarcer-ation contributes to crime in the longrun by adding to idleness and familybreakdown among released prisoners.Scale matters, too. If the negative ef-fects of incarceration were scattered

among a small number of serious crim-inal offenders, these effects may wellbe overwhelmed by reduction in crimethrough incapacitation.

Today, however, clear majorities ofthe young men in poor communities aregoing to prison and returning home lessemployable and more detached fromtheir families. In this situation, the insti-tutions charged with public safety havebecome vitally implicated in the unem-ployment and the fragile family structurecharacteristic of high-crime communi-ties. For poorly educated young men inhigh-incarceration communities, a pris-on record now carries little stigma; incen-tives to commit to the labor market andfamily life have been seriously weakened.

Figure 4Number of Children under Eighteen with a Parent in Prison or Jail, 1980 to 2008




To say that prison reduces crime (per-haps only in the short run) is a spectac-ularly modest claim for a system thatnow costs $70 billion annually. Claimsfor the crime-reducing effects of pris-on, by themselves, provide little guid-ance for policy because other approach-es may be cheaper. Measures to reduceschool dropout, increase human cap-ital, and generally increase employ-ment among young men seem especial-ly promising alternatives. Results forprograms for very young children areparticularly striking. Evaluations of early childhood educational programsshow some of their largest bene!ts de-cades later in reduced delinquency andcrime.11 For adult men now coming outof prison, new evaluations show thatjobs programs reduce recidivism and in-crease employment and earnings.12 Thedemographic concentration of incarcer-ation accompanies spatial concentra-tion. If some portion of that $70 billionin correctional expenditures were spenton improving skills and reducing unem-ployment in poor neighborhoods, a sus-tainable and socially integrative publicsafety may be produced.

Much of the political debate aboutcrime policy ignores the contemporaryscale of criminal punishment, its un-equal distribution, and its negative so-cial and economic effects. Our analysisof the penal system as an institution of

social strati!cation, rather than crimecontrol, highlights all these neglectedoutcomes and leaves us pessimistic thatwidespread incarceration can sustain-ably reduce crime. The current system is expensive, and it exacerbates the so-cial problems it is charged with control-ling. Our perspective, focused on the so-cial and economic inequalities of Amer-ican life, suggests that social policy im-proving opportunity and employment,for young men in particular, holds spe-cial promise as an instrument for pub-lic safety.

Our perspective on inequality pointsto a broader view of public safety that is not produced by punishment alone.Robust public safety grows when peo-ple have order and predictability in their daily lives. Crime is just one dan-ger, joining unemployment, poor health,and family instability along a spectrumof threats to an orderly life. Public safe-ty is built as much on the everyday rou-tines of work and family as it is on po-lice and prisons. Any retrenchment ofthe penal system therefore must recog-nize how deeply the prison boom is em-bedded in the structure of Americansocial inequality. Ameliorating theseinequalities will be necessary to set uson a path away from mass incarcera-tion and toward a robust, socially inte-grative public safety.

endnotes1 We gratefully acknowledge Bryan Sykes, Deirdre Bloome, and Chris Muller, who helped

conduct the research reported in this paper. This research was supported in part by a giftfrom The Elfenworks Foundation.

2 In her essay for this issue, Candace Kruttschnitt shows that women’s incarceration haspronounced effects by separating mothers from their children. The continued growth ofwomen’s incarceration rates threatens to have large effects on family life.

3 Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,2006); Caroline Wolf Harlow, Education and Correctional Populations (Washington, D.C.:Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003).




4 Harry J. Holzer, “Collateral Costs: Effects of Incarceration on Employment and EarningsAmong Young Workers,” in Do Prisons Make Us Safer? ed. Steven Raphael and Michael A.Stoll (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009).

5 Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chica-go: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

6 Christopher Mumola, “Incarcerated Parents and Their Children” (Washington, D.C.:Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000).

7 Megan Comfort, “In the Tube at San Quentin: The ‘Secondary Prisonization’ of WomenVisiting Inmates,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32 (1) (2003): 82; emphasis origi-nal.

8 Christopher Wildeman, “Paternal Incarceration and Children’s Physically Aggressive Be-haviors: Evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study,” working paper2008-02-FF (Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing, 2008).

9 T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Concord, Mass.: Pluto Press, 1992).10 Western, Punishment and Inequality in America, chap. 7.11 Pedro Carneiro and James J. Heckman, “Human Capital Policy,” in James J. Heckman and

Alan B. Krueger, Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? (Cambridge,Mass.: mit Press, 2003).

12 Cindy Redcross, Dan Bloom, and Gilda Azurdia, “Transitional Jobs for Ex-prisoners: Im-plementation, Two-Year Impacts, and Costs of the Center for Employment Opportunities(ceo) Prisoner Reentry Program” (mdrc, 2009).

bruce western & becky pettit incarceration & social inequality · source: becky pettit,...

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