Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration

tem over the past thirty years transformed the path to adulthood followed by disadvantaged minority men? Certainly the prison boom affected many young black men. The U.S. penal population increased six fold between 1972 and 2000, leaving 1.3 million men in state and federal prisons by the end of the century. By 2002, around 12 percent of black men in their twenties were in prison or jail (Harrison and Karberg 2003). High incarceration rates led researchers to claim that prison time had become a normal part of the early adulthood for black men in poor urban neighborhoods (Freeman 1996; Irwin and Austin 1997). In this period of mass imprisonment, it was argued, official criminality attached not just to individual offenders, but to whole social groups defined by their race, age, and class (Garland 2001a:2). Claims for the new ubiquity of imprisonment acquire added importance given recent research on the effects of incarceration. The persistent disadvantage of low-education African Americans is, however, usually linked not to the penal system but to large-scale social forces like urban deindustrialization, residential segregation, or wealth inequality (Wilson 1987; Massey and Denton 1993; Oliver and Shapiro 1997). However, evidence shows incarceration is closely associated with low wages, unemployment, family instability, recidivism, and restrictions on political and social rights (Western, Kling and Weiman 2000; Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999; Sampson and Laub 1993; Uggen and Manza 2002; Hirsch et al. 2002). If indeed imprisonment became commonplace among young disadvantaged and minority men through the 1980s and 1990s, a variety of other social inequalities may have deepened as a result. Although deepening inequality in incarceration and the pervasive imprisonment of Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration