Abstract
Conventional wisdom about the criminal justice system suggests that extralegal factors such as race or employment status should not affect sentencing outcomes. In this paper we examine an alternative model of the relationship between imprisonment and unemployment and race. The model suggests that penal practices are shaped by the labor market conditions of a system of production and that prisons, as part of a larger set of institutions providing support for economically-dependent populations, help to regulate the most superfluous group of workers in the industrial economy of the Northern states of the United States—unemployed black workers who comprise a large fraction of the pool of “reserve” workers necessary for price stability and economic expansion. We find support for the structural model that links black imprisonment (and Northern imprisonment in general) to manufacturing output and black unemployment.
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Notes
Willem Adrian Bonger,Criminality and Economic Conditions, translated by Henry P. Horton, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1916).
Gary S. Becker, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” in Gary S. Becker and William M. Landes (eds.)Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment. (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1974).
Samuel L. Myers, “Do Better Wages Reduce Crime?”American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 43, No. 2 (April, 1984) p.p. 191–196; W. Kip Viscusi, “Market Incentives for Criminal Behavior,” in R.B. Freeman and H.J. Holzer (eds.)The Black Youth Employment Crisis, (University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 301-346.
Early efforts to establish the desirability of adopting employment strategies to fight crime include L. Phillips, H.L. Votey, Jr., and D. Maxwell, “Crime, Youth and the Labor Market,”Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 80, May–June 1972 p.p. 491–504.
Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd E. Ohlin,Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs, (New York: Free Press, 1960).
Robert K. Merton,Social Theory and Social Structure, revised, (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957).
Harvey M. Brenner, “Assessing the Social Costs of National Unemployment Rates” (formal statement submitted before the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy of the U.S. House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee, U.S. Congress, August 12, 1982. Or see “Estimating the Social Costs of National Economic Policy: Implications for Mental and Physical Health, and Criminal Aggression,” prepared for the Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, Oct. 26, 1976.
Phillip J. Cook and Gary A. Zarkin, “Homicide and the Business Cycle,”Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 2, No. 1. (March 1986) pp. 69–80.
Phillip J. Cook and Gary A. Zarkin, “Crime and the Business Cycle,”Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, (January 1985) p. 128.
Richard B. Freeman, “Crime and Unemployment,” in James Q. Wilson (ed.).Crime and Public Policy, (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1983), pp. 89–106.
Note, however, the contrary evidence provided by Samuel L. Myers showing that the employment effects outweigh the criminal sanction effects. Myers, “Estimating the Economic Model of Crime: Employment vs. Punishment Effects,”Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 98, (February 1983) pp. 157–166.
Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer,Punishment and Social Structure, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939).
For empirical evidence on the dynamics of prison populations see Alfred Blumstein and Soumyo Moitra, “An Analysis of the Imprisonment Rate in the States of the United States: A Further Test of the Stability of Punishment Hypothesis,”Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 70 (Fall 1979) pp. 376–390. Or Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, Soumyo Moitra, and Daniel Nagin, “On Testing the Stability of Punishment Hypothesis: A Reply,”Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Winter 1981) 1799–1808. David E Greenburg, “The Dynamics of Oscillatory Punishment Processes,”Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 68 No. 4 (December 1977) pp. 643-651. Also David Rauma, “Crime and Punishment Reconsidered: Some Comments on Blumstein’s Stability of Punishment Hypothesis,”Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 72 No. 4, (Winter 1981) pp. 1772-1798.
Samuel L. Myers, and William J. Sabol, “The Stability of Punishment Hypothesis: Regional Differences in Racially Disproportionate Prison Populations and Incarcerations, 1850–1980,” Paper presented at the Annual Law and Society Association Meetings, Chicago, IL, June, 1986.
Darnell Hawkins, “Beyond Anomalies: Rethinking the Conflict Perspective on Race and Criminal Punishment”,Social Forces, Vol. 65, (March 1987) pp. 719–745; and “Trends in Black-White Imprisonment: Changing of Race or Changing Patterns of Social Control?”Crime and Social Justice, No. 24, (December, 1985) p.p. 187–209.
For sources on this hypothesis, see the sources in footnote 13 and Richard A. Berk, David Rauma, Sheldon L. Messinger, and Thomas F. Cooley, “A Test of the Stability of Punishment Hypothesis: The Case of California, 1851–1970,”American Sociological Review, Vol. 46 (December, 1981) pp. 805–829.
Arthur F. Burns,The Business Cycle in a Changing World, (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1969).
Ibid., p. 83.
Ibid., p. 185.
Marx, Karl,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, (New York: International Publishers, 1967).
David F. Greenberg, “The Dynamics of Oscillatory Punishment Processes,”Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 68 No. 4, (December 1977) pp. 643–651.
Ivan Jankovic, “Labor Market and Imprisonment,”Crime and Social Justice, (Fall–Winter, 1977) 17–31.
M. Inverarity, and J. McCarthy, Punishment and Social Structure, Revisited.” A paper presented at the annual Law and Society Association Meetings, Chicago, Illinois, June 186.
Samuel L. Myers, “Imprisonment and Unemployment,”Urban League Review, (Fall 1986) pp. 98–105.
Previous research, e.g., Greenberg (1977) and Jankovic (1977) has used the unemployment rate or the number unemployed as the measure for the reserve. However, official unemployment rates omit a significant number of persons who are not working but would like to be working and could be defined as members of the labor force if economic conditions became favorable enough to draw them into the ranks of the employed or “officially unemployed.” Further, by most counts the official unemployment figures grossly underestimate the extent of unemployment, particularly among black males. Since we wished to include persons who could participate in the labor force in our unemployment concept, the measure that we used is better than unemployment rates. It does, however, overestimate the true size of the “reserve” since it includes persons who are incapable of working. This probably results in a regression coefficient that is biased downward, which means that the reported coefficients are underestimates of the true effects.
Parole and probation were included in the analysis to determine the effects of changes in penal sanctions on imprisonment. As was described in the text, the theory that we tested grants that criminal justice officials believe that they are responding primarily to the severity of crime and not to levels of employment or unemployment in meting out sentences or releasing convicts. Further, since no measures of crime or crime rates exist for the entire period that we covered, we used parole and probation as proxies for criminal conditions or the effects of crime on imprisonment. If criminal justice officials are influenced by crime rates in sentencing offenders, then we expect to find a negative coefficient on the probation variable. If crime levels are exceedingly high, then the sentencing provided by probation discretion should reflect the tendencies of judges and to combat crime. Use of probation should decrease when crime increases, causing imprisonment rates to increase since judges would be more prone to sentence offenders to prison than, for fear of recidivism, to release them. At the other end, even though parole boards might share in the same reluctance as judges to release offenders early, parole is an effective means to alleviate overcrowded prison conditions. Thus the sign on parole cannot be predicted without ambiguity even though the Berk, et. al. work cited earlier suggests that it should be negative.
Jan Kmenta,Elements of Econometrics, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1971).
The data on prison populations came from the Census Bureau reports on institutionalized persons. Since 1850, the U.S. Bureau of the Census conducted special enumerations of those populations for every decade except 1930. That year’s report was replaced by theNational Prison Statistics of Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories (NPS) an annual report that began in 1926. Data on population and occupation distribution over various years from 1880 to 1984 came from the Statistical Abstracts, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Contact the authors for exact dates and abstracts used for occupation and population as well as abstracts used for information on occupation, agriculture, and employment.
U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics,Handbook of Labor Statistics, 1924–1927, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1927).
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Myers, S.L., Sabol, W.J. Unemployment and racial differences in imprisonment. Rev Black Polit Econ 16, 189–209 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02900929
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02900929