Western and Pettit also document the effects of prisons on families. Those released from prison have a hard time finding jobs, and “workers with prison records experience significant declines in earnings and employment.” Sociologists Bruce Western and Becky Pettit write about the prison “poverty trap,” whereby those released from prison are stuck in a neverending cycle of joblessness and despair, with prison compounding preexisting disadvantages and steadily eroding social institutions.

Mass incarceration ripped black communities apart, taking parents away from children and husbands away from wives. More black men are under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, and a black child whose father didn’t complete high school has a 50 percent chance of seeing him incarcerated by the time she reaches the age of fourteen. Prison sentences of black men were nearly 20 percent longer than those of white men for similar crimes. Soon, one in every fifteen black men would be in jail or prison, with one-third being incarcerated in their lifetimes.

The prison boom had especially harsh consequences for African Americans. The statistics are by now depressingly familiar. Throughout the 1990s, the prison population continued to rapidly expand, until millions were housed in US jails and prisons. His support was not qualified by any serious doubts he emphatically stated that the crime bill reflected the country’s “values.” At his signing ceremony, Clinton announced that in passing the bill, “e together are taking a big step toward bringing the laws of our land in line with the values of our people.”īut as criminal justice journalist Natasha Vargas-Cooper observes, “Those values would come to define the current morass of mass incarceration: punitive, arbitrary, and fear-based.” Clinton’s crime bill “is now widely seen as contributing to the human catastrophe of mass incarceration,” with Clinton overseeing the largest increase in prison inmates of any American president, including Ronald Reagan. Clinton is couching his defense of the bill in punitive terms, praising its extensions of the death penalty, and its funds to increase prisons and police numbers by 20 percent, and mandatory life sentences for a third felony conviction.”

Bill Clinton never treated his brutal criminal justice measures as some sort of morally queasy compromise with Republicans he advocated for them himself and was unequivocal in his defense of them, treating them as a positive good rather than a necessary evil.Īs a British newspaper observed at the time about the signing of the crime bill: “Mr.

Superpredator by Nathan J. Robinson