Introduction
High incarceration rates have been a hallmark of the American penitentiary system since the late 20th century and remain as such until this day. With a correctional population of 1,430,800 in prison and several hundred thousand more in jails by the end of 2019, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world (Carson 1). Apart from being high in both absolute and relative terms, the burden of mass incarceration is also not distributed equally among the different demographics of the American population. These inequalities, which can be fairly profound, beg the question of what are the social determinants of incarceration in the United States.
While an attempt to identify and cover all relevant factors would be too ambitious for a short paper, it is still possible to briefly analyze the relationship between race, poverty, and incarceration. Research suggests that African American and Latino ancestry, as well as low income, both serve as strong predictors of incarceration, given how the American criminal justice system evolved as a governmental response to urban poverty.
Main body
In terms of the relationship between race and incarceration rates in the United States, there is no arguing that there is a strong correlation between non-whites and having a higher chance of being imprisoned. The 2019 statistics detailing the number of inmates in federal and state prisons provided by the US Department of Justice demonstrate this fact with exceeding clarity. According to the report, by the end of 2019, American prisons contained as many as 1,096 black inmates per 100,000 population (Carson 1). It effectively means that more than one percent of the country’s African American population is incarcerated.
For Hispanic inmates, the same number is 525 prisoners for the 100,000 population (Carson 1). In stark contrast, the white part of the American population has 214 prisoners per 100,000 (Carson 1). Thus, the rates of black incarceration are more than five times higher than that of whites, and Hispanics also have more than twice the chance of being incarcerated than whites. These numbers indicate a strong and evident correlation between race and imprisonment within the criminal justice system that currently exists within the United States.
Admittedly, correlation is not necessarily causation, and in order to better understand causation, it is necessary to cover the history of the American criminal justice system in its relation to poverty. Before and during the Second World War, a considerable proportion of African American population moved to the North, and by the 1960s, almost one-third of all American blacks lived in Northern metropolitan areas (Hinton 29).
During the Civil Rights era, the federal government became acutely aware of crime rates and urban unrest in predominantly black areas. In order to address this issue, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations launched social welfare programs to defuse what they called the “social dynamite” of poor African American households (Hinton 30). However, the federal government’s perception of poverty and crime as rooted in individual shortcomings rather than structural factors led to instituting harsher crime control policies alongside the social welfare programs (Hinton 32). Thus, as the political effort to address black poverty materialized in the 1960s, it already combined social welfare and intensified policing.
The decisive turn from the former toward the latter came occurred during Nixon’s administration. Throughout his campaign, Nixon asserted that doubling the conviction rate “would do more to eliminate crime in the future, than a quadrupling of the funds for any governmental war on poverty” (Hinton 138). His policies as the Supreme Executive were fully in line with this approach. On the one hand, Nixon oversaw the dismantlement of social welfare programs introduced as the parts of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society. On the other hand, he made a vigorous effort to reshape and expand the American penitentiary system.
Under Nixon’s leadership, hundreds of new state and federal prisons were constructed (Hinton 138). Moreover, it was during Nixon’s presidency when the incarcerated population of the United States turned from predominantly white to predominantly black and Hispanic (Hinton 138-139). Thus, Nixon’s presidential tenure crafted the system that addressed the problems of crime and poverty in predominantly black neighborhoods through repression and incarceration. Judging by the fact that more than one percent of American blacks are currently imprisoned, this system is still in place.
Summary
To summarize, the American justice system, in its current form, promotes disproportionally high incarceration rates among blacks and, to a lesser degree, Latinos from poor urban neighborhoods. Statistics reveal that African Americans are more than five times more likely to be imprisoned than whites, and the rates for Hispanic incarceration supersede those of white by more than twice. This pattern goes back to the 1960s, when, after the Great Migration and during the Civil Rights Era, poverty and crime in disadvantaged minority communities became an acute problem. While Kennedy and Johnson’s administrations tried to alternate between welfare and repression, Nixon opted decisively in the latter’s favor.
The result was the massive expansion of the penitentiary system and prison-industrial complex that continues to address the social issues arising at the intersection of race and poverty through repression and incarceration.
Works Cited
Carson, E. Ann. “Prisoners in 2019.” US Department of Justice. Web.
Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Harvard UP, 2016.