A New Analysis of Incarceration and Inequality

I’ve written about the intersection of incarceration, race and the labor market several times in the past. In the United States, the remarkable expansion of the prison system over the past thirty years, despite generally falling crime rates, has had far-reaching effects on large segments of the population, but especially amongst unskilled black men. A striking way to characterize the depth of this change is to make a comparison to rates of participation in some other institution —- say, for instance, that more black men have been to jail than are in college. But, as a lobby group found out last year, these comparisions are quite tricky to make properly, because the populations are different (all black men vs college-age black men, for instance).

But one of the many good reasons we have sociologists and demographers is to work out those numbers properly. A new paper [pdf] by Becky Pettit and Bruce Western¹ does a terrific job of estimating how the effects of mass incarceration are distributed across the population. They estimate the risk of imprisonment for black and white men of different levels of education.² The paper is worth reading in its entirety, both to see how the findings might be understood and to understand how one goes about estimating these numbers in the first place — it’s not at all trivial to calculate them. Two core findings — bearing in mind these are the best available estimates — are remarkable:

• Among black men born between 1965 and 1969, 30.2 percent of those who didn’t attend college had gone to prison by 1999. A startling 58.9 percent of black high school dropouts born from 1965 through 1969 had served time in state or federal prison by their early 30s.

• “Imprisonment now rivals or overshadows the frequency of military service and college graduation for recent cohorts of African American men. For black men in their mid-thirties at the end of the 1990s, prison records were nearly twice as common as bachelor’s degrees.” In the same cohort, “imprisonment was more than twice as common as military service.”

Interestingly, racial disparity as such has not grown in sentencing: the rates and risks of imprisonment are 6 to 8 times higher for young black men compared to young whites in both the ‘45-‘49 and ‘65-‘69 cohorts. But class inequality has increased. So while lifetime risk of imprisonment nearly doubled between 1979 and 1999, “nearly all of this increased risk was experienced by those with just a high school education.” Incarceration is now the typical life-event for young, poorly-educated black men.

¹ Full disclosure: Becky’s a friend of mine and Bruce was one of my Ph.D advisers.

² To forestall any misinterpretation, note that “risk” is a technical term here meaning roughly “the probability of being observed as ‘incarcerated’ during the period under study.”

More on Moore

I just got back from seeing Farenheit 9/11. There’s a little voice saying I should pick away, argue about this point or that point, qualify, criticize. Others can do that. Moore makes one point quite brilliantly: that those who suffer and die come overwhelmingly from families and communities that are, shall we say, somewhat poorer than the politicians who chose to go to war, or the executives of the corporations who hope (hoped?) to profit from Iraqi reconstruction. Something like that is true of all wars, and if Moore were just making a general pacifist case then it would have been a weaker film. Instead, he was saying, or I took him to be saying , that those who expect others to bear the risks and costs of their projects better have a convincing justification for them. Self-defence might be one such justification, but plainly not in this case.

Those who have made the “humanitarian” case for war have never addressed the dirty little issue of who runs the risks and who does the dying. Rather, they’ve sought refuge in pointing out the plain truth that Saddam’s Iraq was an evil tyranny and that the world is a better place without it. So it was and so it is. But would or could this war have been fought if the children of the wealthy were at as much risk of dying as the children of the poor? One rather suspects not. It may be unpalatable to think that there’s a moral link between being willing to wage wars for democracy and human rights, and being willing to introduce conscription, but maybe those who have taken a leftist/liberal-hawk line on Iraq should be calling for a citizen army too. I’ve never read them doing so.

Lawsuits and corporatism

Mark Schmitt makes an interesting argument about lawyers and trade unions as functional substitutes for each other in checking corporate power. He notes some evidence suggesting that states with low rates of unionization are “hellhole states” for business, where plaintiff’s lawyers deliver huge amounts for a small number of victims.

Welcome to Slate. Here's your sneer.

In my previous life, I was a member of an active mailing list for fans of ska music. (In tribute, I’ve just created a ska name generator.) Every few months, members would talk about the music that they listened to, outside of ska. It quickly degenerated into a uniquely annoying form of indie one-upsmanship. Popular, marginal, and largely unknown bands were dismissed with contempt (“You’re still listening to Big Black?”). The discussion quickly disappeared down the indie rabbit hole, as members professed their love for vinyl-only releases from obscure foreign noise bands.

My friend Mark managed to shut them up. He wrote a long email about how everyone else was a sellout, and how he had gotten into the most obscure music ever. He would go to the local maternity ward with a stethoscope and listen to a particular fetus’s heartbeat.

Skagroup may be gone (or it might not), but the spirit lives on at the home of sloppy, reflexive contrarianism: Slate.

FMA roundup

The defeat of the Federal Marriage Amendment has led to some awfully good writing.

Fred Clark from the Slacktivist, a left-wing Christian, approaches the question “Why do some Christians hate gays but love bacon?” It’s a beautiful thing.

I’m not a fan of Thomas Frank. His adaptation of his thesis, The Conquest of Cool, is surprisingly good, but his pieces for the Baffler remind me of present-day Christopher Hitchens: sneering, blindingly angry, and unpersuasive to the unconverted. However, he’s managed to pop out a tight editorial for the NY Times. He argues that the failure of the FMA was intentional, part of a continuing effort to reclaim victim status for conservatives.

Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it.

John Scalzi points out that the effort to “defend marriage” would actually have the effect of breaking up thousands of existing marriages.

So it’s pretty simple: If you actually want to defend marriage, you have defend all the legal marriages, and that includes the ones with two men in them, and the ones with two women. Otherwise you’re explicitly saying that the government has the right to void any marriage of any couple, so long as two-thirds of the House, Senate and states go along. Who wants to be the first to sign up for that?

Finally, MoveOn is running a fundraiser specifically for opponents of vulnerable supporters of the FMA. I love this idea.

Pizza, cholesterol check, the works

This little Flash movie by the ACLU about the loss of privacy is hilarious and, of course, scary at the same time.

The new Iraq

Although there’s plenty of news coverage of inquiries into the “intelligence” that justified the Iraq war, coverage of events in Iraq itself seems to have declined sharply since the formal handover of sovereignty and the shutdown of the Coalition Provisional Administration. There seems to be a general media consensus that things have gone quiet, with the result that, when the usual news of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations is reported, it’s always prefaced with something like Suicide Blast Shatters a Calm (NYT 15 July) or after a week of relative calm (Seattle Times 7 July).

Regardless of the calmness or otherwise of the situation, the installation of Allawi as PM has certainly produced a new dynamic. Allawi has moved quickly to establish himself as a strongman, resolving by default the questions left unanswered in the “handover”. His announcements of emergency powers and the establishment of a security service/secret police have been criticised, but they amount to little more than the assumption of powers previously exercised by the CPA with no legal basis of any kind. The big question before the handover was whether any new military operations would be under the control of the interim government or of the American military. Allawi has moved pretty quickly to ensure that he will give the orders here, putting the onus on the American military to come to his aid if his forces run into serious resistance.

A different kind of road trip

Here’s a way to go on a fun and useful road trip this summer: drive to swing states to register Democrats to vote. Driving Votes provides all the necessary forms and helps you coordinate with others.

Classroom Games as Experiments

I’ve been spending the afternoon alternating between writing a syllabus for a decision theory course and websurfing. So naturally I’ve been drawn to web sites about decision theory and game theory. And I was struck by this question David Shoemaker raises - are games played in the classroom covered by rules on human experimentation?

State power and torture

From an editorial in the Washington Post today.

According to the International Red Cross, a number of people apparently in U.S. custody are unaccounted for. Most are believed to be held by the CIA in secret facilities outside the United States. Contrary to the Geneva Conventions, the detainees have never been visited by the Red Cross; contrary to U.S. and international law, some reportedly have been subjected to interrogation techniques that most legal authorities regard as torture.

…

What is known, mostly through leaks to the media, is that several of the CIA’s detainees probably have been tortured — and that a controversial Justice Department opinion defending such abuse was written after the fact to justify the activity. According to reports in The Post, pain medication for Abu Zubaida, who suffered from a gunshot wound in the groin, was manipulated to obtain his cooperation, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to “water boarding,” which causes the sensation of drowning. Notwithstanding the Justice Department opinion, parts of which recently were repudiated by the White House, U.S. personnel responsible for such treatment may be guilty of violating the international Convention Against Torture and U.S. laws related to it.

…

Nor has the CIA’s illegal behavior been limited to senior al Qaeda militants. The agency has been responsible for interrogating suspects in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is believed to have held a number in secret detention facilities. According to official reports, the identities of several in Iraq were deliberately concealed from the Red Cross, a violation of the Geneva Conventions. At least two detainees have died while being interrogated by CIA personnel. One CIA contractor has been charged with assault by the Justice Department in the case of one of the deaths, and at least two other cases are reportedly under investigation. But no higher-ranking CIA officials have been held accountable for the abuses or the decisions that led to them, even though it is now known that former CIA director George J. Tenet was directly involved in the “ghost detainee” cases in Iraq.

The Pentagon and Congress are investigating the Army’s handling of foreign detainees; though they are slow and inadequate, these probes contrast with the almost complete absence of scrutiny of the CIA’s activity.

I’m not especially keen on self-righteous denunciations of the “people of political position x are lying hypocrites unless they immediately denounce y” variety. Still, like Kieran, I have enormous difficulty in understanding why sincere, committed US libertarians (with some exceptions ) aren’t up in arms about this sort of thing. It seems to me to be an open-and-shut case of the kinds of state tyranny that libertarians should rightly be concerned about. Why is state-organized torture a less topical issue than state-imposed limits on political free speech, or individual ownership of firearms? If someone has a consistently argued libertarian argument for why the state should be allowed to torture individuals, I’d like to hear it. If someone has a libertarian argument, or indeed any argument at all, for why the state should be allowed to do this with no public scrutiny or accountability, I’d like to hear that even more.

Quickly Around the Blogs

• It wasn’t intended as a follow-up to our earlier discussion on private vs public health-care performance, but nevertheless in that context it was very helpful for Chris Shiel to link to this paper (PDF) on how well, or as it turns out badly, the US does on health-care outcomes.
• I missed this when it was posted a week ago, but if you’re still interested in this stuff Geoff Nunberg has a very good dissection of that study by Groseclose and Milyo purporting to show liberal media bias.
• And Ben Bradley wants reader input to help choose a murder victim. Purely for academic purposes.

Children's Literature Literature

John Holbo has an interesting post in his ‘John and Belle’ incarnation on superhero comics and nostalgia. His argument, as I understand it is that the classical superhero story is dead - that the ‘straight’ efforts to resurrect it (Michael Chabon’s ‘Escapist’) and the revisionist (Daniel Clowe, Chris Ware) are more closely related than they seem at first sight. They’re exercises in nostalgia, driven by how the “pain of unachieved adulthood contend[s] with hope for redeemed childish innocence.” If we look through the images around which we construct our identities when we are growing up, they provide luminous refractions of our adult complexities.

Transmission

I’m just back from a brief holiday in Pembrokeshire where, among other things, I managed to finish Hari Kunzru’s new novel Transmission. Transmission is a fairly frothy but sharply observed tale of globalized internet folk which centres around the intertwined lives of Arjun Mehta, a microserf swept from his native India to code in the United States, Guy Swift, a London-based postmodern marketing executive and Leela Zahir, a Bollywood icon. I won’t say more, so as not to spoil it. But if you’ve read his earlier The Impressionist , then I’d say that this one is lighter but, on the whole, more satisfactory. Definitely worth taking to the beach.

My Irresistible Rise

Speaking of accepting responsibility, I am planning to take the credit for this trend (also pdf, to print out and hang on your wall). Go to the Social Security Administration Website and investigate some trends for yourself. See the decline of the Heathers, the sudden, spectactular rise of the Ellas, and the terrible Hillary crash of 1993. Then read Stanley Lieberson’s A Matter of Taste for the sociology.

Burke is back!

Oh, happy day! Timothy Burke is back and blogging after his long hiatus! He’s got a nice post up about alleged third-party infantilism, responding to Henry and others; and a long outline proposal for a new model ’21st Century college’. Now all he needs is a PayPal button to help him raise $500 million; and a comments box for all the feedback he’ll needs to help hone these revolutionary ideas. Allow me to solve half these problems by providing the comments box. (No need to thank me, Tim. It’s the least I could do.)

The beauty of the English language

• I accept responsibility.
• You accept responsibility
• He accepts responsibility

Some might argue that the modern meaning of the phrase “accept responsibility” is irksome in that it has only illocutionary significance; without the announcement that X has “accepted responsibility”, one would have the very devil of a job working out that it had happened. Might I suggest that what we ought to do is to coin a generalised version of Douglas Adams’ useful neologism “dogdyke” from his excellen book, “The Meaning of Liff”:

DOGDYKE (vb.)
Of dog-owners, to adopt the absurd pretence that the animal shitting in the gutter is nothing to do with them.

Onward to hell we all go …

Radio edit

We introduced an innovation a few weeks back and completely forgot to announce it. We’re a group blog which frequently has quite lengthy posts. Thus, when one of us does a post of more than a paragraph or two, it’s usually excerpted on the main page, so that the reader needs to click on “read more” in order to finish reading it. As far as we can tell, most readers prefer this ‘radio edit’ - it means that posts don’t disappear rapidly to the bottom of a very long page. However, some don’t. For the latter, we’ve created the Crooked Timber Extended Play Mix, which publishes each post in its entirety to the Crooked Timber main page (you still have to click for comments). If you prefer not to have to click through to read full posts, you should bookmark this version instead (it’s also available in the left sidebar as ‘full post version’).

Is economics an empirical science ?

Tyler Cowen¹ lists a number of economic propositions which he formerly believed, but has abandoned in the light of contrary evidence. Most of these propositions were elements of the economic orthodoxy of the 1980s and 1990s, variously referred to as Thatcherism, neoliberalism, the Washington consensus and, in Australia, economic rationalism. They include the efficacy of monetary targeting, the beneficence of free capital movements and the desirability of rapid privatisation in transition economies.

Following in the same spirit, I thought I’d list a couple of propositions on which I’ve changed my mind in the face of empirical evidence. These are elements of the Keynesian orthodoxy of the 1950s and 1960s, on which I was trained. Following Cowen, I’ll list them as false claims I used to believe

• There is a long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation

• Keynesian fiscal policy is a powerful and reliable instrument for stabilising aggregate demand

On both these issues, I’ve come to accept that Milton Friedman was largely right, and his Keynesian opponents largely wrong.

Public and Private Health Care

Brayden King notes that the Wall Street Journal is concerned about ever-rising health care costs in the United States. I’ve been looking at data on national health systems for a paper I’m trying to write. It turns out that there’s a lot less theoretical work done on comparative health systems than you might think, certainly in comparison to the huge literature on welfare state regimes. Here’s a figure showing the relationship between the “Publicness” of the health system and the amount spent on health care per person per year. Data points are each country’s mean score on these measures for the years 1990 to 2001.

Update: I’ve relabeled the x-axis to remove a misleading reference to ratios.

There's only one Fafblog!

Some philosophers, your humble narrator occasionally included, get irritated when people, especially intro ethics students, focus on what we take to be irrelevant details of what are meant to be serious, if somewhat improbably grisly, examples. But really we’re not upset about the lack of philosophical sophistication our students shown, just about how stylishlessly they complain. If all our intro ethics students were like Fafnir and Giblets I can’t imagine we’d ever be so irritated.

Knock on wood

There has been some discussion - by Matthew Yglesias and Kevin Drum, for example - of the issue of rescheduling elections in the event of a terrorist attack. On the one hand, concern about the administration’s motives in making this proposal; on the other hand, something to be said for laying out clear procedures beforehand. A quick point. The only good such a measure could possibly aim at would be ensuring public confidence and faith in the fairness of an election conducted under extraordinary circumstances. The only thing that could undermine that faith would be concern that extraordinary measures were being taken for partisan political gain. Partisan political appointees can hardly restore faith by fiat. So it isn’t just that a broad bi-partisan commission would be safer for democracy, as Kevin and Matt and others have reasonably remarked. Rather, it’s the case that no other arrangement would hold out any conceivable benefit. You would do just as well muddling through with no procedures in place. So even if you assume Bush and co. will act with the best of wills - an assumption made for argumentative purposes only - there is simply no point to the proposed measure as it stands.

The Right Time

The tragic aspect of my migration to the US is this. I was born middle-aged, in a country where middle-age was considered something of an achievement. I used to look forward to the time when I’d be able to complain with my peers abut the state of today’s youth, and not be complaining about them. But then, at 22, I moved to a country in which nobody is middle-aged — even old people pretend to be young, until they are so doolally that the game is up. And I only truly settled in this country around the time that my chronological age caught up with my natural inclinations. So here I am, a genuinely middle aged in a culture that doesn’t even recognise, let alone celebrate, the phenomenon.

Here’s a show about what is now regarded as middle-age but used to be old age. I especially recommend it to Ophelia Benson, and invite private emails from anyone, including her, to explain why I particularly recommend it to her. The prize is….

What for are English professors?

Bit strange to run across one at this time of year - like Christmas in July - but this is one of the better “I went to the MLA” pieces I’ve read. It deserves a comment box. (Also, I’m sort of curious whether this post will work - sort of like a bat signal - to draw Chun out of retirement.)

There’s a lot here that exercises me tremendously. But if I started I’d never shut-up. You go first. But here’s a polite suggestion. Since the piece is in “The Believer” - and they so stern against snark - let’s try to keep the anti-MLA hatchet-work sub-Peckish, shall we? (Just a suggestion.)

Braised lamb shanks son mas macho

Have you ever read a blog post so aggressively, ferociously wrongheaded that it temporarily sucks all the fun out of political blogging?

Case in point. Glenn Reynolds seems to think that it’s fair to associate the Kerry campaign with a poster for Fahrenheit 9/11 produced by a distributor in the Benelux countries. (I’m still waiting for an explanation from the Kerry/Edwards campaign for White Chicks.) He says that Michael Moore (who is responsible for writing and directing left-wing films of questionable accuracy) is the American version of the Iraqi rebel cleric al-Sadr (who is responsible for killing our soldiers and running a repressive fundamentalist regime in Fallujah). Etc., etc.

I could argue with this nonsense. But wouldn’t all of our time be better spent sharing a genuinely delicious recipe for braised lamb shanks in red wine? I think so.

American civil society

Spinning off from the general question of the left and third parties - what are the political consequences of the US left’s failure to create a long lasting set of social institutions independent of government? Colin Crouch, my former Ph.D. co-supervisor, gave an address which touched upon this last week, where he claimed that neither classical liberalism nor classical social democracy had much to say about society, the former obsessing about the market, and the latter obsessing about the state. He did, however, have to acknowledge that the left created a vibrant set of alternative social institutions in many European countries, which provided all sorts of social benefits to ordinary people. Usually, these networks of institutions were set up in competition with rather similiar networks that were run by the Catholic Church and Christian Democratic party. Both networks were intended to shore up political support by providing tangible goods in return. When I lived in Italy in the late 1990’s, there were a few remants of the old Leftist alternative civil society around - the Casa del Popolo (People’s Palace) in Fiesole had some of the best pizza in town, and ran a great May Day festival.

Of course, none of this really ever got going in the US. The only really active set of alternative social institutions in the US isn’t socialist, or even Christian Democratic - it’s the localized networks associated with evangelical Christianity. The Catholic church also plays a role, especially in education, but isn’t anywhere near as important as far as I can tell (I may be wrong). It seems to me as an outsider that this has shaped the US debate on the proper relationship between state and society in important ways. On the one hand, most left-wingers are virulently hostile to the idea that ‘state’ type social services should be delegated to civil society, because they see civil society as composed of religious zealots who will require that anyone who accepts their services also accept Jesus into their hearts. While this may, or may not be true, it seems to me to be associated with a certain lack of imagination on the left, a failure to think beyond the state. On the other, the enthusiasm of the conservative right for outsourcing social services to civil society is equally a product of the social dominance of religious organizations. How many of them would be keen on this, if, say, there was a thriving set of social democratic third sector institutions that could compete with religious groups to provide services (and perhaps smuggle in a bit of indoctrination along the way?) Not many, I imagine.