How Prisons Amplify Poverty
Yet more drawbacks to mass incarceration.
The New York Times' house libertarian, John Tierney, has written a detailed story on the ways mass incarceration intensifies poverty and other social problems. Here's an excerpt:
The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime. But now that America's incarceration rate has risen to be the world's highest, many social scientists find the social benefits to be far outweighed by the costs to those communities….
Epidemiologists have found that when the incarceration rate rises in a county, there tends to be a subsequent increase in the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy, possibly because women have less power to require their partners to practice protected sex or remain monogamous.
When researchers try to explain why AIDS is much more prevalent among blacks than whites, they point to the consequences of incarceration, which disrupts steady relationships and can lead to high-risk sexual behavior. When sociologists look for causes of child poverty and juvenile delinquency, they link these problems to the incarceration of parents and the resulting economic and emotional strains on families.
Some families, of course, benefit after an abusive parent or spouse is locked up. But Christopher Wildeman, a Yale sociologist, has found that children are generally more likely to suffer academically and socially after the incarceration of a parent. Boys left fatherless become more physically aggressive. Spouses of prisoners become more prone to depression and other mental and physical problems.
"Education, income, housing, health — incarceration affects everyone and everything in the nation's low-income neighborhoods," said Megan Comfort, a sociologist at the nonprofit research organization RTI International who has analyzed what she calls the "secondary prisonization" of women with partners serving time in San Quentin State Prison.
The most interesting point in the piece may be the possibility that prison actually increases crime once the incarceration rate reaches a high enough level. "Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon, both at Villanova University, have found that while crime may initially decline in places that lock up more people, within a few years the rate rebounds and is even higher than before," Tierney writes. "New York City's continuing drop in crime in the past two decades may have occurred partly because it reduced its prison population in the 1990s and thereby avoided a subsequent rebound effect."
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First!
I thought the crime rate decreased generally, and not just in NYC.
Yep, it’s a US-wide phenomenon. A few stark exceptions like Chicago have rebounded back up again.
I wonder why. What’s so special about Chicago? Is it because they lost a great spiritual leader or something?
Well, according to the great* Joshua S. Heller, ghettos don’t exist, and anyone who posits their existence is a racist Islamophobe yokel.
*By great, I refer to the profundity of his stupidity.
And not to get all necrophiliac, but I love this heller quote:
Well, Josh, that would be the Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali, who obviously hates Brown people.
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
The only place these European Muslim No-Go Zones exist is in the fevered minds of retarded nativists and the people gullible enough to believe them.
HM and others have presented evidence that they exist. You have spouted sophistry in response.
I’ve explained why what they have presented is not evidence of what they claim exists. If you wish to show why you think my explanation is wrong you are free to do so.
Can’t read?
This is hilariously simple, you made a claim you can’t back up. The only “evidence” you’ve provided is a video of a bunch of idiots and the word of a guy who is concerned about the influx of “people of other faiths to these shores.” Own up to your mistake and quit embarrassing yourself like a butthurt douche.
Joshua, your are obstinate as someone who believes in AGW. Even when presented with documented evidence you just lie and hurl insults. The only mistake I’ve made is speaking to you as if you were my intellectual equal, for in the words of my mother, Josh, you should only know what I’ve forgotten. So quit projecting; the only person who is “butthurt” is you, as the intellectual poverty of your beliefs have been exposed for all to see.
I notice that you didn’t deign to respond to my point about ultra-Orthodox tznuit patrols, as admit that would completely destroy the narrative you’ve worked so hard to construct.
Having been to Brandeis many times, I know your type well. The upper middle class, usually Jewish, Liberal Arts/Social Sciences student who is so full of guilt for having the privledge to attend such an insitution that they allow themselves to be brownbeaten into self-hatred. So eager are you to please your Arabic or Urdu or Islamic Studies professor that you’ll gleefuly submit to their ideological irrumatio and viciously leap on anyone with the audacity to suggest that all things Islamic aren’t a utopia of sweetness and light.
Wipe your chin, you’re pathetic.
He’s like Ken Schultz #2.
Sorry to spoil your idol’s perfect image but Nazir-Ali is a nativist quack:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6117912.stm
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk…..itain-june
This all sounds very familiar, the idea that Muslims are dirtying the Christian character of the nation with their calls to prayer (church bells are the correct way to do it) and weird culture. Who else loves to engage in KULTUR WAR bullshit and worries about foreign hordes taking over their white Christian utopia? Nah must be a coincidence that the bishop sounds exactly like a nativist quack.
There are numerous accounts of gays being harassed or worse in the Netherlands where there are Muslims.
So?
So…combined with poor police presence, wouldn’t those neighboorhood be “no-go zones” for them?
So wherever there is a crime and Muslims, ghetto? Derp.
Chicago’s crime rate went up last year, but it was a tiny increase most have attributed to the lack of winter. Apart from that, their crime rate has been going down for 20 years, from about 1000 murders a year to 400.
And there’s nothing particularly special about Chicago. It’s violent crime rate is pretty much middle of the pack when it comes to large cities in the US.
Frankly, the only reason people pay attention is because the GOP has been focused on it as a way to attack Obama the last several years. Similar to their totally sincere concern about the increase in Black unemployment under Obama.
“The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime”
That COULD have been the case if the things that they were in prison for were real actual crimes with real actual victims.
Crimes with victims require doing actual police work as stuff, and there’s no property for the police to steal. Basically, they’re nothing but a bother.
Contraband on the other hand, well that’s easy to prove, and the police get to steal any cash or other property that strikes their fancy.
Incentives.
Well maybe the parent should have thought about the effects on poverty rates when he was attacking society by doing the drugs.
A few years ago when they walled off Manhattan as a penal colony and renamed it Detroit, maybe they could have let the inmates bring their families inside. I wonder if that would have been an improvement. Maybe Snake Plissken wouldn’t even have been needed to get the president out.
I don’t know about Tierney’s libertarian cred but the guy has zero science cred (social or real) in my opinion.
A while back he teamed up with social science hack Roy Baumeister to write a pop-sci book about willpower. I wrote about it briefly, here.
In short Baumeister’s sciencey experiments consist of such things as giving college kids a coke then measuring their willpower, by how much they are “stifling prejudice during an interracial interaction”.
Frankly, the only reason people pay attention is because the GOP has been focused on it as a way to attack Obama the last several years. Similar to their totally sincere concern about the increase in Black unemployment under Obama.
That’s so sweet.
My experience with poor people is that most of them are rats, bed bugs, or vampires, and I have a lot of experience living with and working with the poor.
Let’s move on to the real scandal, now: America’s penal system is set up to coerce innocent people to pay for prisons on the pretext of making criminals pay a debt to society.
Granted, we have far too many laws and far too many people are locked up as a result. Still, it would be helpful if authors who criticize the practice of imprisonment offered alternatives. Whipping? Stocks? Exile? (We don’t exactly have a Siberia, but Utah might bore ’em to death.)
Looks more like a criminal lifestyle than incarceration per se that causes poverty.