Former Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility as part of a re-entry event highlighting educational programs promoting rehabilitation on July 28, 2014.
Seeking to understand reentry following incarceration, Harvard University’s Bruce Western, a professor of sociology, observed 122 people—men and women who were caucasian, African American and Latinx—in the year after they were released. What he found was the story that large datasets compiled through radio button surveys and coding can’t capture: the complex factors driving racial and ethnic disparities in the process of reentry.
Though Western’s point was observation over quantification, some of the numbers he arrived at were staggering: Any given month, unemployment was 50 percent higher for the African American and Latinx men in his study than the white men. Those numbers served as the springboard for Western’s true value-added—piecing together the full story of how and why these discrepancies existed within his sample.
Unsurprisingly, white men had a huge advantage when it came to getting jobs and to getting higher-income jobs relative to their counterparts of color. Where African American and Latinx men were finding minimum wage jobs in retail and food, earning $6,000 per year on average, white cohort members earned about double that on average and as much as $40,000 in a few circumstances. (Not a single African American or Latinx man enjoyed similar prosperity, Western notes.)
The explanation is painful and simple: networks. White men benefited from social connections, he notes. They also, presumably, benefited from not encountering racial discrimination in resume reviews and interviews. When it comes to the job application process, white applicants get 36 percent more callbacks than their equally qualified African American counterparts and 24 percent more than Latinx counterparts. Anti-black hiring discrimination hasn’t changed in nearly 30 years.
When it came to formerly incarcerated women, Western found that most were focused on attempting to reunite with children and family. Even for women of color who are not incarcerated, their parental rights are more precarious, not only because of racism but because they are more likely to live in poverty. Those who have been incarcerated must not only worry about the conflation of poverty and neglect but, in most cases in Western’s study, custody, as a threshold matter.
While many members of Western’s group lived in poverty, and experienced its sequelae, he found women were most deeply affected:
As serious as these problems were as a whole, they were really off the charts among the women who we spoke to. Nearly all of the women we interviewed were struggling with mental health problems. Many suffered from chronic pain, back pain and arthritis that really limited their day-to-day functions. The histories of victimization were very, very extreme. Here’s a group of people who have been victimized by violence, often since early childhood, often struggling with very serious drug addiction and mental health problems, a lot of chronic pain and disease that they’re trying to manage. These are the life challenges that bring them into conflict with the law and generate the circumstances in which they’re catching criminal cases. In the absence of a real social safety net for them, the prison becomes a place in which they’re housed. They get a rudimentary level of medical care and drug treatment. This institution that’s designed for punishing crime becomes the place in which women were gaining housing and treatment. It’s perverse.
It is this systemic view that sets Western—and his recommendations—apart. He acknowledges the conditions, and criticizes the policies, that have “grown this massive prison system.”
What’s called for, Western emphasizes, is a reorientation: focusing on supporting those who have been harmed by violence, including those who have committed violence, rather than on punishment. (Incarceration is, after all, itself a form of violence.) That means recognizing historic harms, as well as extant racial bias, and inspiring cultural reform.
The essence of incarceration, Western points out, is severing social bonds. Isolation is perhaps the most counterproductive approach to ameliorating violence. Western urges improvements in health care, housing security, and income support—a holistic approach to strengthening communities and social bonds.
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