How does mass incarceration relates to social class and racial inequality?

Explain it in one paragraph plz

Whether called mass incarceration, mass imprisonment, the prison boom, the carceral state, or hyperincarceration, this phenomenon refers to the current American experiment in incarceration, which is defined by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among young, African American men living in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. Although there is scholarly consensus about how to define mass incarceration, there is some level of disagreement over its causes and consequences. Some say it deters and incapacitates; others say that it weakens poor families, keeping them socially marginalized. While some have advanced a functionalist argument as to the causes of mass imprisonment, suggesting that it is the fourth “peculiar institution” for the control of African Americans—following slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto—others have argued that a combination of cultural shifts, political realignments, changes in job prospects for low-skilled men, and perhaps most importantly, legal changes have driven the dramatic increase and absolute disparity in rates of imprisonment over the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The massive increases in imprisonment might be justifiable if public safety were dramatically improved. Yet despite some accounts suggesting quite beneficial effects of incarceration on crime rates, the majority of the evidence now suggests either that incarceration’s effects on crime are not nearly as large as once suspected or that the crime-fighting benefits of imprisonment have so diminished over the last few years of the 20th century and the early 21st century that incarceration is now a much less effective method for crime control than it was before the 1990s. Given the high rates of imprisonment and racial disparity in imprisonment, incarceration may be significant as a generator of social inequality. It is this possibility that recent research considers, focusing on effects on the individuals who cycle through the system and on those who are attached to them,their communities, families, and friends. Despite substantial obstacles to causal inference (a point stressed in many of these readings), much of this research suggests that mass incarceration has the potential to substantially increase social inequality, because it is unequally distributed and because it has negative effects on prisoners and their social correlates. Although much of the research considers the consequences of imprisonment for individuals in nations with lower overall rates of incarceration (most notably the United Kingdom and The Netherlands), the majority of the works cited here focus on effects in the United States, where incarceration levels are high.

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Question- How does mass incarceration relates to social class and racial inequality?

Directions- Explain it in one paragraph plz

Answer- In the last few decades, the institutional contours of American social inequality have been transformed by the rapid growth in the prison and jail population.1 America’s prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As an outcast group, the men and women in our penal institutions have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream. Social and economic disadvantage, crystallizing in penal confinement, is sustained over the life course and transmitted from one generation to the next. This is a profound institutionalized inequality that has renewed race and class disadvantage. Yet the scale and empirical details tell a story that is largely unknown. Though the rate of incarceration is historically high, perhaps the most important social fact is the inequality in penal confinement. This inequality produces extraordinary rates of incarceration among young African American men with no more than a high school education. For these young men, born since the mid-1970s, serving time in prison has become a normal life event. The influence of the penal system on social and economic disadvantage can be seen in the economic and family lives of the formerly incarcerated. The social inequality produced by mass incarceration is sizable and enduring for three main reasons: it is invisible, it is cumulative, and it is inter-generational. The inequality is invisible in the sense that institutionalized populations commonly lie outside our official accounts of economic well-being. Prisoners, though drawn from the lowest rungs in society, appear in no measures of poverty or unemployment. As a result, the full extent of the disadvantage of groups with high incarceration rates is underestimated. The inequality is cumulative because the social and economic penalties that flow from incarceration are accrued by those who already have the weakest economic opportunities. Mass incarceration thus deepens disadvantage and forecloses mobility for the most marginal in society. Finally, carceral inequalities are inter-generational, affecting not just those who go to prison and jail but their families and children, too. The scale of incarceration is measured by a rate that records the fraction of the population in prison or jail on an average day. From 1980 to 2008, the U.S. incarceration rate climbed from 221 to 762 per 100,000. In the previous five decades, from the 1920s through the mid-1970s, the scale of punishment in America had been stable at around 100 per 100,000. Though the incarceration rate is now nearly eight times its historic average, the scale of punishment today gains its social force from its unequal distribution. Like criminal activity, prisons and jails are overwhelmingly a male affair. Men account for 90 percent of the prison population and a similar proportion of those in local jails. The incarceration rate has been growing faster among women in recent decades, but the social impact of mass incarceration lies in the gross asymmetry of community and family attachment. Women remain in their communities raising children, while men confront the possibility of separation through incarceration.2 Age intensifies these effects: incarceration rates are highest for those in their twenties and early thirties. These are key years in the life course, when most men are establishing a pathway through adulthood by leaving school, getting a job, and starting a family. These years of early adulthood are important not just for a man’s life trajectory, but also for the family and children that he helps support.

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