Out of sight, out of mind.

 

Kieran Healey at Crooked Timber reviews a book on a worrying subject:

Over the years I’ve written about the work of Bruce Western, Becky Pettit, Chris Uggen, and other scholars who study mass incarceration in the United States. By now, the basic outlines of the phenomenon are pretty well established and, I hope, widely known. Two features stand out: its sheer scale, and its disproportionate concentration amongst young, unskilled black men. It should be astonishing to say that more than one percent of all American adults are incarcerated, and that this rate is without equal in the country’s history and without peer internationally. Similarly, it may seem hard to believe that “five percent of white men and 28 percent of black men born between 1975 and 1979 spent at least a year in prison before reaching age thirty five”, or that “28 percent of white and 68 percent of black high-school dropouts had spent at least a year in prison by 2009″.

Those numbers come from the first chapter of Becky Pettit’s new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress. You can read the first chapter for free, but I recommend you buy the book. Pettit’s argument is that mass incarceration is such a large and intensive phenomenon that it distorts our understanding of many other social processes.

Pettit and others have been arguing for a long time that incarceration is by now a modal event in the life-course for young black men. Black men are more likely to go prison than complete college or serve in the military, and black, male, high-school dropouts are more likely to spend a year in prison than to get married. These social-structural changes have consequences for measuring and counting those involved. The incarcerated population is hard to count properly, and in many commonly-used data sources, like the Current Population Survey, its size and composition is poorly estimated or simply excluded. This has knock-on effects for our understanding of trends—especially changes in racial gaps—in things like rates of educational attainment, the employment-to-population ratio, group differences in average earnings, and voter turnout. In many of these cases, Pettit shows, what look like improvements over time are partly or mostly explained by miscounting due to the incarcerated population. This invisibility can happen both while people are in prison (as many surveys don’t adequately count the prison population) but also on release, where the marginal status of many ex-convicts makes them hard to reach in surveys built around sampling individuals stably attached to single households...