Essay 3 Draft

The Economics of Incarceration

There is no question that America has an incarceration problem, with over 2 million people imprisoned by the end of 2006 (Forman 47). One sticking point in the overarching debate is when the policy that leads to the issue actually begins. Lawyer Michelle Alexander points to the climax of the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She characterizes tough-on-crime legislation as a reaction to growing civil liberties for African Americans. She writes “the rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights movement” (Alexander 50). Basically, Alexander believes that Civil Rights were a driving force in the creation of policy that led to mass incarceration. She later points to the War on Drugs as the primary means that the Southern governors used to carry out this plan. This idea has been refuted by many scholars, including James Forman Jr. and Elizabeth Hinton, who cite the earlier “wars” on crime and poverty. In her book, Hinton maintains that “This [the idea that race is pathological] consensus distorted the aims of the War on Poverty and also shaped the rationale, legislation, and the programs of the War on Crime” (Hinton 3). She argues that race played a large part in both the Wars on Poverty and Crime. Hinton demonstrates the deep roots of Mass Incarceration, way before Alexander’s War on Drugs. While Alexander emphasizes racial dynamics and Hinton highlights flawed policies, both overlook how bipartisan economic compromises reshaped the War on Poverty, sowing the seeds for mass incarceration. In this essay, I will argue that Mass Incarceration has its roots during the War on Poverty, which was based on the ideals of “new economics”. New economics was heavily influenced by party politics of the time, which distorted it to a degree that it became harmful to the very people that it was trying to help.

To fully understand my argument, we have to look back into the politics of the 1950s and 60s, specifically under John F. Kennedy. “Poverty” does not even become a popular term to describe any group until the “war” itself. Policy from the years leading up to LBJ’s presidency commonly does not even use the word (O’Conner 140). When JFK becomes president, he takes on an ambitious goal to tackle the growing issue of poor people (possibly as a way of avoiding Civil Rights). The Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), under JFK, with chairman Walter Heller, began to play a larger role in economic policy and its implementation. Leading economic theorists of the time (Keynes, Friedman, Becker) are all over the place, with different ideas to uplift the lower class, but it mainly boils down to overall economic growth, targeted social services (education, training, etc.), and community action. The combination of these ideas, the main agenda for the CEA, is dubbed “new economics”.

Throughout the 1960s, we see a shift in new economics. What starts out as a very progressive set of ideals turns into one, revolving around economic growth. This occurs as the CEA needs to “sell” itself to become a policy-making institution. In Alice O’Conner’s view, the CEA “concentrated on drumming up support for a major, unprecedented series of tax cuts as a way to stimulate growth” (O’Conner 145). The shift in the strategy of the CEA occurs when they need to appease conservative economists, which were focusing more on inflation at the time. This compromise leads them to drop goals like furthering access to education in low-income communities. This actually coincides with the ideas of Michelle Alexander, who argues that “images of the poor as ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ became central components of the debate. Ultimately, the radicalized nature of this imagery became a crucial resource for conservatives” (Alexander 58). Here, Alexander talks briefly of the growing economic conflict that leads into her civil rights ideas. She too, understands the control that conservative politics had on the economic agenda of the time. The CEA’s shift to an “economic growth” scheme greatly helped their support from politicians on the right.

At this point, you might be wondering how all of this economic theory and politics connects to Mass Incarceration. Elizabeth Hinton helps us connect the dots between the War on Poverty and the War on Crime. She says “following the passage of the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, the federal government began to retreat from and eventually undercut many of the Great Society programs” (Hinton 2). For context, Great Society included many War on Poverty programs. Here, Hinton shows the gradual shift in focus on a federal level from social welfare to a tough-on-crime stance. The idea that did stick around during this shift, however, was the need for economic growth through cutting taxes and decreasing inflation. The CEA continued to push their agenda of lowering taxes instead of addressing one of the root causes of poverty, lacking education in underprivileged communities. The War on Crime simply attacked people in a hole left behind from the War on Poverty. In his essay, James Forman cites a study that “found that college graduates comprised 2.4% of state prisoners throughout the country” (Forman 55). In other words, studies like this one have shown that people who finish college make up a disproportionately smaller percentage of the prison population. When the new economic movement and the CEA turned away from education as a strategy to combat poverty, they did not give communities the resources they needed to stay out of trouble, hence creating the need for a War on Crime.

The War on Crime (and later the War on Drugs) undoubtedly introduced the system that leads to more people being put into jail for longer. In the words of Hinton, “during the two decades between the passage of the Law Enforcement Assistance Act and the launch of Reagan’s War on Drugs, the country added 251,107 citizens to the prison system. The American carceral state has continued its rapid growth ever since” (Hinton 5). The statistics used here underscore the relevance of the War on Crime in the Mass Incarceration issue.

An idea that we commonly see discussed in academic works about this topic is the emergence of crime statistics to underscore the necessity of tough-on-crime policy. This trend is actually born in the world of economics. In the early 60s, we see the field of economics begin to use statistics to back up their work. Economics, a historically theoretical thought field, turns into an exact science. Alice O’Conner describes the CEA as needing to “establish their credibility as analysts, backing their positions with an impressive array of statistical tables” (O’Conner 145). The rise of statistics is another reason why economists were forced to lose the education and community building aspect of their proposals – they would not have an immediate change on crime or poverty statistics.

Some scholars, like Hinton, might disagree with the impact that political compromise impacted the acceleration of Mass Imprisonment. Hinton portrays the makings of the policies during the Wars on Crime and Poverty in a more black and white way. She says that the policy was “highly flawed in their intellectual foundations and designs” (Hinton 31). I say that many of the bills that were created during this time period were not as intellectually flawed as she argues here. While there were a great number of simply racist theories during this time frame, the core of most of the economic plans during the JFK and LBJ administrations was rooted in the compromise between liberal and conservative factions. The parts that were “chopped off” were the parts that were not based in a discriminatory way of thinking. Others might disagree that Mass Incarceration has roots that stretch back so far into the 50s and 60s. Alexander argues that we should point to the War on Drugs as the primary catalyst. However, it is evident that the War on Poverty’s economic policy played a large role in its perpetuation.

If policymakers, historians, and authors stopped to think about it, many of them might simply assume that we have conservatives and the War on Drugs to blame for our ginormous prison population. Upon closer inspection, it is clear to me, at least, that the concessions made decades prior to Reagan set us on a collision course to Mass Incarceration. Mass Incarceration has its roots during the War on Poverty and new economics, greatly influenced by both party politics and the emergence of statistics, which caused economists to lose sight of important programs that might have helped us avoid the imprisonment of thousands of people. The community and education programs that could have existed may well have changed the trajectory of this nation on a foundational level.

Honor Code TH

Bibliography
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Tenth Anniversary edition., The New Press, 2020.
Forman, James Jr. “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow.” New York University Law Review, vol. 87, no. 1, 2012, pp. 21–69.
Hinton, Elizabeth Kai. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Harvard University Press, 2016. davidson.primo.exlibrisgroup.com, https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674969223.
O’Connor, Alice. “In the Midst of Plenty: The Political Economy of Poverty in the Affluent Society.” Poverty Knowledge, Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 139–65. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7s5p3.10.