Mass Incarceration Has Become the New Welfare
When Ta-Nehisi Coates says that America’s bloated and enormously expensive dependence on imprisonment has created a “social service program … for a whole class of people,” he hits the nail on the head. Perhaps correctional expenditures—police, courts, jails, prisons, halfway houses, parole offices, and all the rest—are better classified as “welfare” expenditures.
Mass incarceration is not just (or even mainly) a response to crime, but rather a perverse form of social spending that uses state power to address a host of social problems at the back end, from poverty to drug addiction to misbehavior in school. These are problems that voters, taxpayers, and politicians—especially white voters, taxpayers, and politicians—seem unwilling to address in any other way. And even as this spending exacts a toll on those it targets, it confers economic benefits on others, creating employment in white rural areas, an enormous government-sponsored market in prison supplies, and cheap labor for businesses. This is what the historian Mike Davis once called “carceral keynesianism.”
.. Bringing together Moynihan’s concerns about black family structure with the cold fact of mass incarceration produces a striking conclusion: Mass incarceration actually causes crime. In its long-term impact on the black family, mass incarceration has many of the disintegrative effects that Moynihan attributed to slavery.
.. Still, this continuity does leave open important questions—why did the incarceration rate, which remained steady for a century after the end of slavery, spike after 1970? Why did the black incarceration rate, which had always exceeded that of whites, increase so much more rapidly in the same era?
One view is that cries for “law and order” in the late 1960s brought together southern Democrats and conservative Republicans under the umbrella of the “southern strategy.” Unable any longer to object openly to housing and school integration, civil rights, or black political power, politicians decried instead the threat of “crime” and “welfare” as shorthand for white racial resentment.
.. How would the nation react if one out of every four white men between the ages of 20 and 35 spent time in prison