THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS

OF MASS INCARCERATION

john clegg and

adaner usmani

O ver the last five decades, the incarceration rate in the United
States has exploded. In the 1960s, the United States incarcerated
its population at a rate that was comparable to other developed coun-
tries. Today, America ranks among the most punitive states in world
history — second only to the Soviet Union under Stalin. Black men born
between 1965 and 1969 have been more likely to go to prison than to
graduate from college.1 American punishment is thus of unprecedented
severity — more prisoners per capita than ever before, and more so than
any comparable country in world history. It is also characterized by
extreme inequality — some Americans are much more likely to languish
in prisons than others.2 These are its twin features. What explains them?

1  Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race
and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 69, no. 2
(2004): 164.
2  Note that in addition to inequality across people, there is also great inequality
across places within the United States. Because of the extent of local autonomy in the
administration of criminal justice, some have argued that the United States is better
conceived as a patchwork of 50 or even 3,000 criminal justice systems. Some places
incarcerate their populations at close to the European norm; others are more than an

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

The standard story is that mass incarceration is a system of racial-

ized social control, fashioned by a handful of Republican elites in
defense of a racial order that was being challenged by the Civil Rights
Movement. “Law and order” candidates catalyzed this white anxiety
into a public panic about crime, which furnished cover for policies that
sent black Americans to prison via the War on Drugs. It is difficult to
overstate how influential this story has become. Michelle Alexander’s
The New Jim Crow, which makes the case most persuasively, has been
cited at more than twice the rate of the next most-cited work on Amer-
ican punishment.3 In a review of decades of research, the sociologists
David Jacobs and Audrey Jackson call this story “the most plausible
[explanation] for the rapid increase in U.S. imprisonment rates.”4
Yet this conventional account has some fatal flaws. Numerically,
mass incarceration has not been characterized by rising racial dispar-
CLEGG & USMANI

ities in punishment, but rising class disparity. Most prisoners are not
in prison for drug crimes, but for violent and property offenses, the
incidence of which increased dramatically before incarceration did.
And the punitive turn in criminal justice policy was not brought about
by a layer of conniving elites, but was instead the result of uncoordi-
nated initiatives by thousands of officials at the local and state levels.
So what should replace the standard story? In our view, there are
two related questions to answer. The first concerns the rise in violence.
Partisans of the standard account argue that trends in punishment
were unrelated to trends in crime, but this claim is mistaken. The rise
in violence was real, it was unprecedented, and it profoundly shaped

order of magnitude harsher. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarcera-
tion — and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
3  Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblind-
ness (New York: The New Press, 2010). On average, The New Jim Crow has been cited
around 1,000 times a year since its publication in 2010. David Garland’s The Culture of
Control has been cited roughly 500 times a year since its publication in 2000.
4  David Jacobs and Aubrey L. Jackson, “On the Politics of Imprisonments: A Review
of Systematic Findings,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6, no. 1 (2010): 129.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

the politics of punishment. Any account of the punitive turn must

address the question that naturally follows from this fact: why did
violence rise in the 1960s?
The key to understanding the rise in violence lies in the distinc-
tively racialized patterns of American modernization. The post-war
baby boom increased the share of young men in the population at
the same time that cities were failing to absorb the black peasantry
expelled by the collapse of Southern sharecropping. This yielded a
world of blocked labor-market opportunities, deteriorating central
cities, and concentrated poverty in predominantly African-American
neighborhoods. As a result, and especially in urban areas, violence
rose to unprecedented heights.
This pattern of economic development generated a racialized social
crisis. But this raises a second question: why did the state respond to
this crisis with police and prisons rather than with social reform? Vio-

CLEGG & USMANI

lence cannot be a sufficient cause of American punishment because
punishment is just one of the ways in which states can respond to
social disorder. Some states ignore crime waves. Others seek to attack
the root causes of violence. Why did America respond punitively?
The answer to this question lies in the balance of class forces in the
United States. In reaction to soaring crime rates, the American public,
white and black alike, demanded redress from the state. Politicians,
white and black, pivoted to respond. But the weakness of the Amer-
ican working-class prohibited meaningful social reform. Moreover,
due to the persistent incapacity of the American state to redistribute
from rich taxpayers to impoverished cities, no sustained, significant
effort to fight crime at its roots was feasible. As a consequence, state
and local governments were left to fight violence on the cheap, with
only the inexpensive and punitive tools at their disposal. Thus, the
overdevelopment of American penal policy at the local level is the
result of the underdevelopment of American social policy at the fed-
eral level. American exceptionalism in punishment is but the flip side
of American exceptionalism in social policy.

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

T HE STANDARD ST O RY

In the standard account, American mass incarceration is a system

of race-based social control. White elites constructed the carceral
state in order to curry favor with ordinary white Americans who were
worried by the changing character of the America around them. Yet
there are at least three problems with this view.5
First, if American mass incarceration were a system of race-based
social control, we should expect to see a rise in racial inequalities in
punishment corresponding to the punitive turn (i.e., black incarcera-
tion rates should have increased substantially, and white rates much
less or not at all). Yet white incarceration increased just as rapidly as
black. Most of the growth in the ratio of black to white incarceration
occurred in an earlier period of American history (1880–1970), after
the end of slavery and during the first Great Migration.6 Since 1990,
CLEGG & USMANI

it has been declining.7

As Figure 1 shows, what has risen most dramatically over the last
few decades is the disparity in incarceration between rich and poor.
The incarceration rate among those with less than a high school edu-
cation has skyrocketed, while the incarceration rate amongst college

5  We have elsewhere subjected the conventional view to closer scrutiny. There, we

discuss the account in more detail, and note several other weaknesses that we do not
raise here. See John Clegg and Adaner Usmani, “The Racial Politics of the Punitive
Turn” SSRN Working Paper (2019).
6  Christopher Muller, “Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in
American Incarceration, 1880–1950,” American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 2 (2012):
281–326.
7  See Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn, eds., The Growth of Incar-
ceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (Washington, D.C.:
The National Academies Press, 2014): 58. Figure 1 does show this disparity rising until
2000; it suggests that about half of the rise in the racial disparity occurred before 1970,
and half between 1970 and 2000. But here we estimate the incarceration rate by the
institutionalization rate of men aged eighteen to fifty calculated from Census samples
(Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Josiah Grover, Erin Meyer, Jose Pacas, and Matthew
Sobek, ipums USA: Version 9.0 [Dataset]. Minneapolis: ipums, 2019), which is not to
be preferred to the actual imprisonment data used by Muller and Travis et al. Those
data suggest the fall in the racial disparity began earlier, and that racial disparities in
the early twentieth century were higher and rose faster than do our data.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

FIGURE 1: DISPARITIES IN RATES OF INSTITUTIONALIZATION

BY RACE AND EDUCATION, 1850–2018

50

Black/White HS Dropout/College Grad

40

30
Ratio

20

10

1850 1900 1950 2000

This figure shows trends in two ratios: (1) the ratio of black to white institutionaliza-

CLEGG & USMANI

tion rates; (2) the ratio of the institutionalization rates of high school dropouts to college
graduates. We use the institutionalization rate rather than the incarceration rate to
ensure consistency across ipums Census samples. This has the cost of including the in-
stitutionalized population as well as the incarcerated population. For this reason, we
follow precedent and restrict our sample to nonimmigrant men aged eighteen to fifty
(see Derek Neal and Armin Rick, “The Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress after
Smith and Welch,” nber Working Paper, July 2014). On the safe assumption that a very
small proportion of this population is institutionalized in non-carceral facilities and
that this proportion does not vary much over time and by race or education, these data
can be used for this purpose.

graduates (both black and white) has declined (see Figure 2).8 If white
elites contrived mass incarceration to control newly enfranchised
African Americans, why has the probability of a black college graduate

8  Some of the increase in this ratio between 1970 and 2017 could be due to selection,
since the share of the population without a high school degree declined. As an al-
ternative, we also calculate the ratio in institutionalization rates between men aged
eighteen to fifty whose years of schooling put them in the top quartile of the adult
educational distribution in any given year and those from the bottom quartile in the
same year. Trends in this ratio suggest a delay in the increase in class disparities, but
otherwise they yield the same conclusion: it exploded over this period. In 1970 the
ratio was 7.41. In 2017, it was 47.9.

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

FIGURE 2: RATES OF INSTITUTIONALIZATION, BY

EDUCATION AND RACE, 1970–2018

< HS Grad HS Grad

15

10
% Institutionalized, Men Aged 18−50

Some College >= College Grad

15

10

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

White Black
CLEGG & USMANI

This figure shows the percentage of men aged eighteen to fifty living in institutions
between 1970 and 2017, disaggregated by education and race. Data are from ipums
Census samples.

going to prison halved over this period?9 In 2017, a white high school
dropout was about fifteen times more likely to be in prison than a
black college graduate.10
Second, to make the case that mass incarceration was a narrowly
political project, the standard story has fixated on the War on Drugs.
After all, the view concedes that black Americans have been arrested,
charged, convicted, and sentenced for a crime. Proponents of this view

9  Again, we estimate this by the institutionalization rate for men aged eighteen to
fifty with a college degree (or more), which was 0.54 percent in 1970. In 2017, it was
0.27 percent. The institutionalization rate for men aged fifteen to fifty drawn from the
top quartile of the educational distribution in 1970 was 0.72 percent; the same rate in
2017 was 0.27 percent.
10  The institutionalization rate for white men aged eighteen to fifty without a high-
school diploma was 4.05 percent in 2017 (4.05 percent/0.27 percent = 15.1). In 1970, the
same ratio was around 3.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

FIGURE 3: CRIME RATES, 1960–1995

400
Violent Crime
Property Crime
Homicide Rate (Mortality)
Level (1960=100)

Homicide Rate (FBI)

300

200

100

1960 1970 1980 1990

This figure shows the crime rate over the period of its rise, between 1960 and
1995. These data come from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, which compiles

CLEGG & USMANI

data on arrests from police agencies. Data for the homicide rate also come
from mortality statistics (“Mortality”). As we discuss again later, these data show
nearly identical trends over time, though the levels are always higher since some
fraction of homicides never result in an arrest.

argue that the criminalization of everyday drug use gave police, pros-
ecutors, and judges the pretext to put blacks but not whites in prison.
By now, the problems with this argument have been widely doc-
umented.11 Only a minority of American prisoners are incarcerated
for drug crimes. At all levels of government — federal prisons, state
prisons, and local jails — drug prisoners make up no more than one-
fifth to one-fourth of inmates.12 If one counts only the key victim
of the standard story — the nonviolent, non-repeat user who has no
ties to the drug trade — the figure is somewhere around 4 percent.13

11  See Pfaff, Locked In, 44–97.

12  In 2019 drug prisoners made up 21 percent of the total incarcerated population.
Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019,” Prison
Policy Initiative (March 2019).
13  See Eric L. Sevigny and Jonathan P. Caulkins, “Kingpins or Mules: An Analysis
of Drug Offenders Incarcerated in Federal and State Prisons,” Criminology & Public

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

A little less than half of inmates in prison or jail have been convicted
or charged with various kinds of violent offenses (41 percent), another
17 percent with property crimes.
To prove that incarceration bears no relation to actual levels of
crime, partisans of the standard story commonly claim that crime
and punishment are uncorrelated at the national level. Between
1990 and 2008, they observe, the incarceration rate increased. It has
since stabilized at very high levels. Over this same period, crime has
declined precipitously.
To some, this is evidence that punishment must have nothing to
do with crime. But this ignores the extraordinarily significant rise in
crime that predated the punitive turn. From 1960 to 1990, as Figure
3 shows, the homicide rate doubled, the property crime rate trebled,
and the violent crime rate roughly quintupled. Moreover, those who
make this claim commit the mistake of comparing a stock (the total
CLEGG & USMANI

prison population in a given year) to a flow (the rate of crime per year).
As Figure 4 shows, the violent crime rate is positively correlated with
the flow of prisoners in and out of American prisons (i.e., the change
in the incarceration rate).
To note all this is not to resurrect old arguments that Amer-
ican punishment is the necessary consequence of American crime.
Defenders of the conventional view are right to emphasize that the
state’s response was political. Most of this essay is devoted to substan-
tiating this claim. But the rise in violence did detonate the punitive
turn. Without the rise in crime and the ensuing public panic, the rise
in incarceration would not have transpired.
Third, a deeper problem with the standard story is that its pro-
tagonists are a narrow cast of national, Republican elites driven by
a single aim (to recapture the South from the Democrats). It shares
this characteristic with the bespoke left-wing alternative, in which
mass incarceration is a conspiracy not of white Republicans but of a

Policy 3, no. 3 (July 2004): 421.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

FIGURE 4: LEVELS AND CHANGES OF INCARCERATION AND

CRIME RATES, 1960–2010

Crime Punishment

1
Normalized Level

−1

−2

Incarceration Rate

Change in
Incarceration Rate
2

CLEGG & USMANI

1
Normalized Level

−1

−2

1960 1980 2000

This figure shows the violent crime rate and the prison incarceration rate from
1960 to the present. These data show that the crime rate is not correlated to
a measure of the stock of American prisoners, but that it is
substantially correlated to a measure of the flows in and out of American
prisons. Crime data are from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and
imprisonment data are from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

wealthy elite seeking to “punish the poor.”14 The reality is that agency
was diffuse. Mass incarceration unfolded in thousands of institutions
across the country. These institutions were staffed by a diverse set
of actors, all working under constraints set by the political economy
of twentieth-century America and subject to an American electorate
that was increasingly anxious about crime.
The standard story thus makes the common mistake of blaming
a scandalous outcome on a cabal of scandalous actors. In the case of
American incarceration, this is an especially egregious error. American
criminal justice is distinguished by the degree to which members of
local electorates have influence over criminal justice institutions and
outcomes.15 In America, unlike other countries, state or local elec-
torates vote for many of their prosecutors and judges; police officers
are governed by elected mayors and sheriffs rather than unelected
bureaucrats; and state legislatures make decisions that are elsewhere
CLEGG & USMANI

delegated to civil servants at the center.

In short, the standard story has led us astray. It has done so in
three main ways. It mischaracterizes the population that languishes
inside American prisons; it ignores the shaping role of violence on
the politics of the punitive turn; and it overlooks the decentralized
and atypically democratic character of American criminal justice
institutions. It is ripe for replacement.

14  See Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
(New York: Verso, 2008); Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Gov-
ernment of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). For a more
structural account, see Ruth W. Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and
Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
15  See Nicola Lacey and David Soskice, “Crime, Punishment and Segregation in the
United States: The Paradox of Local Democracy,” Punishment & Society 17, no. 4 (Oc-
tober 2015): 454–81; Joachim J. Savelsberg, “Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal
Punishment,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 4 (January 1994): 911–43.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

CRIME

Advocates of the conventional view have suggested that the rise in

crime was an invention of some combination of politicians, police,
the media, and fearful white citizens. However, crime did rise dra-
matically in the 1960s. Figure 3 plots trends in homicide, property
crimes, and violent crimes.16 It shows that between 1960 and the peak
of the crime wave, the homicide rate roughly doubled, the property
crime rate trebled, and the violent crime rate quintupled.17 There is
also evidence that the increase in violence was concentrated in urban
areas, with African Americans disproportionately likely to be both
offenders and victims.18
The rise in crime was in some part the unsurprising result of
demographic trends at mid-century. A “baby boom” had occurred
in the aftermath of World War ii, as couples who had put off having

CLEGG & USMANI

16  Violent crimes are conventionally defined as those in which victims are harmed
by or threatened with interpersonal violence. These include rape, robbery, assault,
and homicide.
17  Why should we trust these data? First, and most uncontroversially, there is sub-
stantial over-time agreement in the rate of homicide reported by both police and mor-
tality statistics. Concerns about police reporting practices do not apply to coroners,
yet both sources report a doubling of the American homicide rate between 1960 and
the peak of the homicide wave. Second, while independent data on other forms of
victimization are unavailable before the first victimization survey in 1973, after 1973
they trend similarly to police data. This suggests that any biases in the police data are
minimal (to the extent they existed at all, they were likely short-lived). To explain a
quintupling of the violent crime rate between 1960 and 1995, they would have to be
impossibly large, sustained, and far-ranging.
18  While crime also rose in rural areas, it generally rose more in cities. In cities with
more than a million inhabitants, homicide rates tripled from 1960 to 1970 (a 202 per-
cent increase from 6 to 18.4 per 100,000), while robbery increased six-fold (a 482 per-
cent increase from 133 to 778 per 100,000). By contrast in small cities and towns of
less than 10,000 homicide rates fell in the 1960s (from 2.7 to 2.6 per 100,000) and rob-
bery rates increased by only 84 percent (from 13 to 24 per 100,000). See Barry Latzer,
The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America (New York: Encounter Books, 2015), 122.
Apart from being disproportionately urban, the crime rise was otherwise distributed
fairly evenly across America’s geography, with some regional convergence. See Steve
Cook and Tom Winfield, “Crime Across the States: Are US Crime Rates Converging?”
Urban Studies 50, no. 9 (May 2013). For a discussion of the evidence on crime and race
see the conclusion below.

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

children during the war raced to start families during the prosperity
of the postwar period.19 This led to more crime for two reasons: (1)
most crime is committed by young men, so an increase in the share
of young people in the population, all else being equal, should lead
crime to increase; (2) a larger birth cohort may face more competi-
tion upon labor-market entry, stimulating conflict and demand for
illicit forms of income generation.20 In the US case, this demographic
explanation seems to fit the shape of the crime wave, which began
with a rise in “juvenile delinquency” in the late 1950s and ended in
the “great crime decline” of the 1990s, just when the baby boomers
were “aging out” of crime.21
But the baby boom cannot explain most of the crime rise. Age-ad-
justed crime rates show that crime rose considerably among all age
groups.22 Why? Standard answers — a loss of political legitimacy,23 or
the rise of a “subculture of violence”24 — raise more questions than
CLEGG & USMANI

19  Most Western democracies experienced a spike in crime in the 1960s, a common
trend which may be partly explained by similar “baby booms” elsewhere. Note, how-
ever, that the level of crime in the United States was generally an order of magnitude
above levels in these countries, both before and after the spike. See Manuel Eisner,
“Modernity Strikes Back? a Historical Perspective on the Latest Increase in Interper-
sonal Violence,” International Journal of Conflict and Violence 2, no. 2 (2008): 288–316.
20  Richard Easterlin, Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Easterlin also points to institutions of
social control being unprepared to handle the larger cohort.
21  Franklin E. Zimring, The Great American Crime Decline (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
22  The highest existing estimate is that the baby boom explains 45 percent of the
increase from 1958 to 1969. Charles Wellford, “Age Composition and the Increase in
Recorded Crime,” Criminology 11 (1973): 63. More conservative estimates range from
16 to 22 percent. James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Na-
ture (New York: Free Press, 1985): 426; Steven D. Levitt, “The Limited Role of Changing
Age Structure in Explaining Aggregate Crime Rates,” Criminology 37 no. 3 (1999): 589.
23  Gary LaFree, Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and The Decline Of Social Institutions
In America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998); Roth, American Homicide; Eisner, “Mo-
dernity Strikes Back?”; Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence
Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
24  Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti, The Subculture of Violence: Towards an
Integrated Theory in Criminology (London: Tavistock Publications, 1967); Thomas
Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005);

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

they answer, not least because they are just as plausibly consequences
of the crime wave. In point of fact, the rise in violence was incubated
by the concentrated forms of deprivation that dotted America’s urban
landscape by mid-century. These were the result of two peculiar
features of American modernization: first, the unique character of
its agrarian transition; and second, its distinctive fiscal and political
geography, which inhibited cross-place redistribution.
Unlike other countries in the developed world, the United States
experienced industrialization without large-scale rural-to-urban
migration. Its labor force was not drawn from masses of peasants
driven from their land, as in Britain. Instead, its nascent urban indus-
tries relied heavily on immigrant labor during the nineteenth century,
while family farming continued to grow into the early twentieth cen-
tury.25 American industry only began to turn to its rural hinterlands for
labor during World War I, and especially after European immigration

CLEGG & USMANI

controls came into effect in 1924. The cheapest homegrown source
of labor was the African-American sharecropper in the South, whose
living standards had been kept low by Jim Crow segregation and
labor-repressive agriculture. The initial movement of rural blacks to
cities in search of better-paying jobs contributed (along with the Agri-
cultural Adjustment Act) to the collapse of the sharecropping system
in the 1930s. This in turn led to a second and much larger wave of
migration in the 1940s and 1950s. Around 40 percent of Southern-born
blacks moved North in those decades, but the second great migration
also had a counterpart within the South, as the African-American
population of Southern cities also expanded rapidly.
The best available evidence suggests that this migration contrib-
uted to an increase in violent crime.26 Claims that migrants brought

Latzer, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America.

25  Gavin Wright, “American Agriculture and the Labor Market: What Happened to
Proletarianization?” Agricultural History 62, no. 3 (1988): 182–209.
26  Derenoncourt provides the most thorough assessment of the causal impact of the
migration. Among her outcomes are homicide, race riots, incarceration, and police
spending. While all are positively affected by black migration from the South (which

21
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

with them “a subculture of violence” do not stand up to scrutiny.27

But nor do accounts which indict a racist backlash from urban whites
and their representatives.28 The main culprit was structural rather
than cultural or revanchist. As we will explain below, American labor
and housing markets were in no state to absorb the new migrants.
Those migrants had little or no wealth of their own due to the legacy
of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial exclusion from education, jobs, and
homeownership. Even if they had wanted to, city governments were
in no position to address the resulting concentration of poverty
and unemployment in predominantly black inner-city neighbor-
hoods. Meanwhile basic social services were being undermined by
the ongoing reallocation of people, jobs, and tax dollars to growing
suburbs. It was primarily these factors that led to the explosion of
urban crime rates.
The collapse of agricultural employment in the South was mas-
CLEGG & USMANI

sive. In 1910, almost half of working-age black men in America were

employed in the agricultural sector. In 1960, less than 8 percent were.
Despite some decades of robust job growth, urban labor markets

she identifies using prior patterns of migration and Southern economic conditions),
the effect on crime is the largest and most persistent. Ellora Derenoncourt, “Can You
Move to Opportunity? Evidence From the Great Migration,” online working paper,
last accessed October 2019.
27  There are at least three problems with this thesis. First, we observe no compara-
ble increase in homicide after the first great migration. Second, there are no racial
disparities in homicide in the rural South, where this culture supposedly came from
(Catherine Cubbin, Linda Williams Pickle, and Lois Fingerhut, “Social context and
geographic patterns of homicide among US black and white males,” American Jour-
nal of Public Health 90 [April 2000]). Third, what evidence we have suggests that re-
cent migrants were less likely than Northern blacks to commit crime (Charles Tilly,
“Race and Migration to the American City” in James Q. Wilson, ed., The Metropolitan
Enigma: Inquiries into the Nature and Dimensions of America’s “Urban Crisis” [Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967]).
28  This argument, like the subculture of violence one, struggles to account for the
absence of a comparable crime wave following the first great migration, which argu-
ably led to a greater white backlash (e.g., the “Red Summer” of 1919). Those who point
to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements as the object of the sixties backlash
must account of the fact that violence began to rise in the early sixties and continued
at high levels long after the influence of these movements had waned.

22
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

never replaced these lost jobs.29 The problem only worsened as the
flow of migrants increased, and urban economies began to change.
Thus, while the first wave of migrants (during WWI and the 1920s)
had largely been absorbed into industrial jobs, the second wave was
invariably less likely to find work. Moreover, due to the segregated
nature of urban labor markets, employment opportunities for the
children of first-wave migrants were undermined by competition
from the second wave.30
Underlying the declining fortunes of rural migrants was a transfor-
mation in urban labor markets that was particularly consequential for
unskilled men. In key areas like Detroit, deindustrialization began as
early as the 1950s, as industry relocated first to the suburbs and then
to the Sunbelt.31 The loss of key manufacturing jobs was exacerbated
by automation and rising foreign competition. Figures 5 and 6 show
the share (and change in the share) of the working-age male popula-

CLEGG & USMANI

tion living in central cities which was neither employed nor in school,
disaggregated by skill level, race, and region. Those who dispute the
idea that the rise in crime had economic causes commonly cite the fact
that 1950 to 1970 was a time of general prosperity.32 And indeed, over
this period, the unemployment rate was low, as was the percentage
of the adult population without a job or not enrolled in school. But
as these figures show, national prosperity masked severe and, soon,
growing difficulties for unskilled and especially black men in central
cities. Around a quarter of low-skilled black men between the ages of
eighteen and fifty were neither in employment nor in school in 1960
and the number rose over the following decade.

29  Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, “The New African American
Inequality,” Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (June 2005): 75–108.
30  Leah Boustan, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cit-
ies and Labor Markets (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016).
31  Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar
Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
32  Latzer, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America; Pinker, The Better Angels of
Our Nature.

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

FIGURE 5: RATES OF JOBLESSNESS, BY RACE, SKILL, AND

REGION, 1940–2018

Lowest Skill Highest Skill

50

40

Non−South
30
% Neither in Job Nor School

20

10

50

40

South
30

20

10

1940 1960 1980 2000 2020 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

White Black
CLEGG & USMANI

This figure shows the proportion of men aged eighteen to fifty, living in central cities,
who were neither in a job nor in school in the census year, disaggregated by skill level
and region. “Lowest skill” refers to men whose educational attainment classifies them
in the bottom quartile of the adult educational distribution in a given year; “highest
skill” refers to men from the top quartile. These data are from ipums Census samples.

As the urban economy changed, the social prospects for those

who remained in the cities plummeted further. William Julius Wilson
provides the standard account of this transformation,33 but, as our
figures suggest, the story he tells begins earlier and is not limited to
the Northeast and Midwest. The percentage of low-skill working-age
men without a job began to increase rapidly after 1970, and it did so
also in the South. While both white and black men were affected,
trends amongst black Americans were categorically more severe, such
that joblessness would soon become the norm for certain groups.34

33  William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass,
and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
34  In 1960, about 19.8 percent of unskilled, black men between the ages of eighteen

24
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

FIGURE 6: CHANGES IN JOBLESSNESS, BY RACE, SKILL, AND

REGION, 1940–2017
White Black

15

10

Non−South
Change in % Neither in Job Nor School

−5

15

10

South
5

−5

CLEGG & USMANI

40s 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s 00s 10s 40s 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s 00s 10s

This figure shows the decade-on-decade change in the share of lowest-skilled men aged
eighteen to fifty without a job and not in school, living in central cities, disaggregated
by race and region of the country. Note that joblessness begins to increase slightly in
the 1960s, and that this increase spans the South and not-South. Data are from ipums
Census samples.

For many, cities went from being the place one moved to find a job
to being the place one left to find a job.
Critically, not everyone was equally able to leave. By the 1960s, as is
well known, white Americans began to flee the central city in droves.
These decisions are typically attributed to their racist aversions to
living alongside blacks. Such aversions were commonplace; embodied
in restrictive covenants and a violent defense of the “color line.” But the
growth of the suburbs in this period is arguably better understood as a

and fifty, and living in cities were neither in a job nor in school. By 1970, 21.3 percent
were. By 1980, the same figure had almost doubled to 37 percent. And by 2010, a full 52
percent of these men were neither employed nor in school.

25
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

case of capital flight, enabled by America’s peculiar fiscal geography.

In the 1950s federal spending and subsidies redirected investment
from cities to suburbs via a boom in highway and home construc-
tion.35 Factories moved to the suburbs to take advantage of the new
infrastructure, escape urban union strongholds, and benefit from
lower taxes — and many skilled and white-collar workers followed
them. Homeowners sought to take advantage of the federal subsidies,
but they also moved to avoid the rising property taxes that were to
fund citywide social programs won by progressive urban alliances.
Thus white homeowners fled not only from areas into which blacks
were making inroads, but also from neighborhoods that remained all
white.36 Importantly, many black homeowners also moved, taking
advantage of recently won residential desegregation laws.37 Thus
cities became increasingly segregated and poor even as civil rights
victories opened up new opportunities for the black middle class.38
CLEGG & USMANI

When these homeowners left the city, they took their tax dollars
with them. The loss of revenue starved city-level social services,
including education, public housing, and policing. The police, in
particular, began to crack down under the strain, compensating for
their inability to maintain order (as evinced by falling clearance rates)
by exemplary acts of brutality.39 The result was a vicious spiral: as

35  Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
36  Boustan, Competition in the Promised Land.
37  This contributed to a sharp increase in inequality among African Americans. Wil-
son Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978).
38  Massey finds that the average dissimilarity index across tracts for twelve major
metropolitan areas increased from 77 in 1950 to 81 in 1960 and 83 in 1970 (a high point
for the twentieth century). Douglas S. Massey, “Residential Segregation and Neigh-
borhood Conditions in U.S. Metropolitan Areas” in Smelser, Wilson and Mitchel (eds.),
America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences (Washington, D.C.: Nation-
al Academy Press, 2001).
39  Although we lack comprehensive statistics, the late 1960s appear to have seen a
peak of deaths at the hands of the police. Hundreds were killed by police in the de-
cade’s urban rioting. One study calculated that the Chicago Police Department alone
killed seventy-eight people in 1969 and 1970 (fifty-nine of them African American),

26
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

cities hemorrhaged tax revenues, overcrowded schools lost funding,

the housing stock deteriorated, and crime rose, the pressure to leave
mounted. But the poor (disproportionately black) could not leave.
They had no collateral and poor credit, and their access to the suburbs
was further limited by zoning restrictions, minimum lot-sizes, and a
deliberate lack of public transport.40 They remained trapped in central
cities that were being abandoned by both capital and the state, locked
out of the consumption boom enjoyed by the rest of the country.
The result was a rise in violence that was historically unique in
its speed and ferocity. Between 1960 and 1980 the US homicide rate
had more than doubled to 10.7 per 100,000, the peak for the twentieth
century (exceeding the previous peak of 9.7 per 100,000 in 1933). It
remained at or around this level until the mid-1990s. These levels
of violence were an order of magnitude more severe than anything
observed in any other developed country. If crime rates had remained

CLEGG & USMANI

at their 1975–1984 level, the average American would have had an
83 percent chance of being the victim of a violent crime over the
course of their lifetime.41
Moreover, the explosion of average victimization coincided with
high and often rising inequalities in the distribution of violence.
Violence rose in rural, urban, and suburban areas, but the rise was
concentrated in central cities. Medium to large cities (200,000+)
accounted for about half the growth of arrests in the 1960s, including
67 percent of the growth in homicide arrests and 72 percent of the
growth in robbery arrests, despite making up only a third of the sample

one death every 11.9 days. Ralph Knoohuizen, Richard P. Fahey and Deborah J. Palm-
er, Police and Their Use of Fatal Force in Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Law Enforcement
Study Group, 1972).
40  Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the
Democratic Party (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015). Restricting FHA
mortgage insurance from poor and black neighborhoods (“redlining”) amplified
these dynamics. But even without redlining, intergenerational poverty would have
denied many the credit or collateral necessary to move to the suburbs.
41  Herbert Koppel, Lifetime Likelihood of Victimization (Washington, DC: Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1987): 2.

27
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

population.42 Rates of victimization and offending rose for both blacks

and whites, but since racial disparities were already high in 1950,
the explosion of violence in the 1960s led to unprecedented rates of
violence in black neighborhoods.43 By the early 1970s African Amer-
icans made up the majority of both victims and offenders in several
categories of violent crime, and homicide had become the leading
cause of death for young black men.44
Rising urban un- and under-employment, especially for poor black
men, together with a deterioration of education and social service
provision, meant a reduction in legitimate forms of income gener-
ation. At the same time, opportunities for consumption and status
attainment in the rest of society were rapidly increasing, leading

42  Arrest data from Uniform Crime Reports include both rural and urban arrests.
Crime reports (which the UCR only gives for urban areas) reveal growth concentrated
in the larger cities. Cities with more than 200,000 people account for half of all the
CLEGG & USMANI

decennial increase of reported urban crime, 73 percent of the increase in homicides

and 80 percent of the increase in robbery, despite making up just over a third of the
urban population in the sample. Cities of more than a million (of which there were
only six in 1970) account for a quarter of the increase of reported crime and half the
increase in robbery, despite making up only 15 percent of the sample. fbi, Uniform
Crime Reports 1960 (US Government Printing Office 1961); fbi, Uniform Crime Reports
1970 (US Government Printing Office 1971).
43  Racial disparities in homicide victimization were stable over the 1960s (both black
and white homicides roughly doubled) but disparities in arrest for robbery, rape, and
property crime appear to have risen over the decade, generally peaking in the early
1970s. Gary LaFree, “Race and Crime Trends in the United States, 1946–1990” in Dar-
nell Hawkins (ed.), Ethnicity, Race, and Crime: Perspectives Across Time and Place (Al-
bany: State University of New York 1995): 180. The racial disparity in homicide arrests
also increased slightly in central cities. Roland Chilton, “Homicide Arrest Trends
and the Impact of Demographic Changes on a Set of U.S. Central Cities.” in Block and
Block (eds.) Trends, Risks, and Interventions in Lethal Violence: Proceedings of the
Third Annual Spring Symposium of the Homicide Research Working Group (Washing-
ton, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995): 99–113.
44  Reynolds Farley, “Homicide Trends in the United States.” Demography 17, no.
2 (May 1980): 177. In 1973 victimization surveys identified African Americans as of-
fenders in 67 percent of robberies, 50 percent of rapes, and 29 percent of aggravated
assaults, while the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 1976 (the first year for
which data is available) African Americans made up 54 percent of homicide offenders.
Patrick Langan, “Racism on Trial: New Evidence to Explain the Racial Composition of
Prisons in the United States.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 76, no. 3
(1985). We will return, in the conclusion of this article, to these racial disparities, and
explore what they do and do not mean.

28
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

to additional stigma and frustration for those stuck at the bottom.

Finally, the strain on institutions of social control reduced the cost
of crime by reducing the risk of getting caught. The net effect of these
three changes was to increase the expected returns to illicit means of
income generation. Crime began to pay more just as other sources of
income dwindled for those who remained trapped at the bottom of
deteriorating urban labor markets.
It is easy to see how this could lead to an increase in property crime,
but why the rise in interpersonal violence? In part this is because
illicit trades (e.g., drugs, gambling, prostitution, etc.) are regulated
by violence. That said, at most, about half of the homicides in Amer-
ica’s largest cities are related to the illicit economy.45 The other part
of the story is sociological. The collapse of employment led to the
collapse of communities, undermining the informal social controls
that maintain order under ordinary circumstances.46 Moreover, both

CLEGG & USMANI

of these changes most affected places in which policing had long
been ineffective and brutal. Chronic mistrust and racialized neglect
yielded low clearance rates.47 This further incentivized violence, for
people who believe they may be killed with impunity have a strong
incentive to resort to preemptive violence.48 It was the confluence of
these circumstances that explains the rise in violence.
To summarize, American cities in the 1960s were characterized
by the collision of two sets of facts, one stable and one changing. On

45  Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Vio-
lence in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 141. As they also note,
illicit trades in other countries are regulated by much less violence.
46  Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, “Neighborhoods
and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy,” Science 277, no. 5328 (Au-
gust 1997): 918–24.
47  Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (New York, NY: Spiegel
& Grau, 2015).
48  Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi, “Homicide in Black and White,” Journal of
Urban Economics 68, no. 3 (2010): 215–30. O’Flaherty and Sethi demonstrate that when
each party knows that the other has little to lose, and faces a low risk of apprehension,
expectations of violence quickly become self-fulfilling.

29
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

top of an existing pattern of racial discrimination and the economic

exclusion of African Americans came the transformation of the urban
economy, the continued urbanization of Southern blacks, and mid-
dle-class flight. The result was the economic decline of the (central)
city, particularly felt in historically black areas, while the rest of the
country was prospering. Communities and social services were put
under increasing strain, while law enforcement was unprepared for
the consequences. The stage was set for an unprecedented rise of
violence, which led to the highest homicide rates observed in any
developed country in the twentieth century. How America (partic-
ularly the American state) would respond was as yet undetermined.
We now turn to this response.

P UNIS HME N T
CLEGG & USMANI

Partisans of the standard story deem the rise in crime an invention

of clever politicians. These politicians, the argument goes, used
the language of “law and order” to transmute anxiety about the
Civil Rights Movement into panic about a fictitious rise in criminal
activity. But in the 1960s and 1970s there was nothing for politicians
to invent. Crime rose, and it rose to particularly high levels in poor
black neighborhoods.

The Public

We know that the public noticed the rise in crime, and responded
to it by turning more punitive in its attitudes towards punishment.
This point has been made most comprehensively by Peter Enns, who
has gathered a large amount of public opinion data from different
sources over this period.49 Previous work on public opinion had
studied idiosyncratic questions and often single snapshots in time,

49  Peter K. Enns, Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Puni-
tive Democracy in the World (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

30
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

FIGURE 7: TRENDS IN PUNITIVENESS BY RACE, 1955–2014

0.6

White Black

0.5
Punitiveness

0.4

0.3

0.2

CLEGG & USMANI

1960 1980 2000

This figure shows trends in punitiveness by race, where punitiveness is defined as the
probability that a respondent to a random question from a public opinion poll of the
period answers that question punitively. These trends come from roughly 300,000 re-
sponses to thirty-nine different questions about crime and punishment, from almost
200 different public opinion surveys administered between 1955 and 2014. Data are
from the Roper Center, the General Social Survey, and the American National Election
Survey.

but Enns aggregates information from dozens of questions asked

repeatedly over this period to estimate the public’s punitiveness. He
finds that the punitiveness of the American public rose discernibly as
crime rose, before falling in the late 1990s as crime, too, began to fall.
To be sure, the vast majority of the American public in this period
was white. Thus, a rise in aggregate punitiveness is not obviously at
odds with the standard story. Enns does show evidence from campaign
documents at the time suggesting that politicians were reacting to,

31
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

rather than fashioning, the public’s views, but one could still object
that rising punitiveness might just have been a reaction to the Civil
Rights Movement rather than a response to crime.
But, as we have argued elsewhere, there are at least two features
of public opinion over this period that do not fit this view.50
First, in our own analysis of data similar to Enns’s (Figure 7), we
find that the rise (and fall) in punitiveness is characteristic of not just
white but also black opinion. If the public’s punitiveness was nothing
but a reaction to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, it is odd that
black Americans, who were the primary beneficiaries of these gains,
should also turn punitive. The rise in crime, which hit black commu-
nities especially hard (because crime rose to much higher levels) is
the more plausible explanation. This interpretation fits recent case
studies of black communities in Harlem and Washington, DC, in which
it is argued that public panic about rising, high crime rates came to
CLEGG & USMANI

dominate black politics in this same period.51

Second, if the standard story were right, over-time trends in white
public opinion should mirror over-time trends in the strength of the
Civil Rights Movement. As the movement peaked, so should have
white anxiety (and thus punitiveness). But these trends do not coin-
cide. Civil rights protests peaked in the late 1960s, declining soon
after. The white public’s punitiveness, on the other hand, peaked in
the mid-1990s, roughly twenty-five years after the peak of the Civil
Rights Movement, not long after the height of America’s postwar crime
wave. This is another reason to believe that crime, and not the conflict
over civil rights, drove the public’s attitudes towards punishment.52

50  See Clegg and Usmani, “The Racial Politics of the Punitive Turn.”
51  James Forman Jr, Locking Up Our Own: The Story of Race, Crime, and Justice in
the Nation’s Capital (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2017); Michael Javen Fortner,
Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
52  White Americans do have noticeably (and consistently) higher levels of punitive-
ness. In arguing that the Civil Rights Movement did not drive over-time trends in pun-
ishment, we are not denying that the long-standing biases of white Americans help
explain the state’s response. We reflect on this issue in more detail in the conclusion.

32
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

Politicians

Observers of the politics of punishment in this period have noted that

law-and-order concerns became commonplace among politicians —
most prominently among Republicans, but among Democrats too.
Historians and social scientists have argued that an emergent law-
and-order coalition was cobbled together by politicians with disparate
constituencies.53
Together, these authors make two major arguments about this
period. First, they argue that its protagonists were federal politicians,
who engineered the public’s punitive turn. In these accounts, it is
political entrepreneurs like Wallace, Goldwater, Reagan, and Nixon
who catalyzed the racial anxieties of white Americans into demands
for punishment. Second, they suggest that where conservatives led,
liberals quickly followed. This view is particularly pronounced in two

CLEGG & USMANI

recent books about the period.54 These authors argue that the liberal
agenda was, in the end, not all that different from the conservative
one. Both liberals and conservatives endorsed, if only implicitly,
long-standing and racist theories about why crime was rising and why
it was especially high amongst black Americans. And in response,
liberals, like conservatives, clamored only to expand the punitive
arms of the state.
On both points, this work overreaches. First, this account gets the
causal sequence of the 1960s backwards. The public panicked not

53  Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary Amer-
ican Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Elizabeth Hinton, From the
War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting
Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton University Press, 2017);
Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York,
NY: Oxford University Press, 2014); Vesla M. Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Devel-
opment of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 21, no.
2 (2007): 230–65.
54  Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime; Murakawa, The First Civil
Right. See Adaner Usmani, “Did Liberals Give Us Mass Incarceration?,” Catalyst: A
Journal of Theory and Strategy 1, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 169–83.

33
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

because political entrepreneurs emerged, but because crime rose

precipitously. This panic defined the context in which all politicians
of this period were operating. Talk of law and order became not just
viable, but compelling. And it was in this context that the entrepre-
neurs of the period emerged. As Michael Flamm argues in his history
of this period, it was precisely because the American public was
growing fearful of crime that the conservative case against liberalism
met with such success.55
None of this is to dismiss the role of racism in fashioning a new
punitive common sense. In selling “get tough” politics to white Amer-
icans, politicians profited from racist tropes about black Americans.
But note two qualifications. First, as Flamm argues, racism was potent
precisely because crime was rising and, especially, because black
Americans were disproportionately represented amongst offenders.
The racial overtones of political rhetoric succeeded because the white
CLEGG & USMANI

public was panicking about black crime. The public was not panicking
about black crime because of the racial overtones of political rhet-
oric. Of course, conservatives pandered, sometimes explicitly, often
implicitly, to cultural, moralizing, and racially coded interpretations
of these disparities. They rejected the structural interpretations for
rising crime and black-white disparities advanced by most liberals of
the period. But they did not invent these disparities, or, indeed, invent
public attention to them. Second, as Forman and Fortner have both
shown, “get tough” politics became political common sense in black
communities as well. It is not clear, in other words, that an America
shorn of anti-black animus would have been an America without
any brand of law-and-order politics. We will have more to say about
the role of racism in American punishment at the end of this essay.
Second, while liberals could not avoid responding to peo-
ple’s fears about crime, they initially responded very differently
than did conservatives. In the relevant documents of the Johnson

55  Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of
Liberalism in the 1960s (Columbia University Press, 2007).

34
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

administration — the final reports of the Kerner and Katzenbach

Commissions, for instance — the liberal view is plain. At root, the
enemy is not poorly socialized teenagers, collapsing families, or the
pathological choices of the urban poor. The root causes of crime,
according to the leading liberals of this period, lay in limited labor-
market opportunities for unskilled, young, and especially black men,
a predicament made worse by the concentration of these young
men in collapsing cities with underfunded public programs and an
overstretched, under-resourced, and often abusive law enforcement
apparatus.
It is thus no accident that these same documents called on liberals
to conceive of the war on crime as a war on these root causes. The
report of the Kerner Commission ends with four recommendations
to fix urban disorder: expand welfare, expand housing, transform
education, and create jobs. The Katzenbach Commission demanded

CLEGG & USMANI

that law enforcement be professionalized, centralized, and aggres-
sively funded, while reminding its readers that the ultimate causes
of crime lay in structural inequality. And in arguing this, liberals
were right: because the rise in crime was a symptom of the failures of
American modernization, its remedy lay in an aggressive expansion
of the social-democratic state.

What Success Required

Yet, as this new scholarship on the carceral state emphasizes, liberals

did fail. Crime rose inexorably in the 1960s, seemingly impervious to a
variety of liberal initiatives, and despite almost continuous attention
to the issue by the Johnson administration.
To understand liberal failure, one has to first appreciate what
success would have required. Consider liberals’ choices. On the one
hand, they had recourse to the state’s punitive arms (police, prisons,
and the courts). Both conservatives and liberals agreed that these
policies mattered. On the liberal view, however, the crime rate was

35
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

additionally (and primarily) governed by a second set of social poli-

cies: welfare, unemployment, housing, education, and health care.
When politicians in the 1960s tried to wage war on the root causes of
crime, it was to these tools that they turned.
In the abstract, anti-crime agendas can be usefully classified
into the four quadrants that these two dimensions delimit: harsh
or hands-off penal policy, paired with expansive or stingy social
policy.56 The conservative position in the 1960s was that the United
States needed less social policy (in fact, conservatives attributed
crime at least partly to the paternalism of the welfare state) and more
punitive penal policy. The liberal argument was that crime required
a dramatic expansion of social policy and a modernization of penal
policy. What is not often appreciated about the liberal policy agenda
is that, to succeed, it required an unprecedented redistributive effort.
This is a critical point, so it bears detailing. In either the punitive
CLEGG & USMANI

or social dimensions, expansion or contraction is generally a matter

of dollars spent. This is obviously true of social policy, which mostly
consists of redistributing resources, whether in kind or in cash, from
rich to poor. But it is also characteristic of penal policy. While there are
ways to make police, prisons, and the courts more punitive without
spending more money on them (e.g., by cutting programs for pris-
oners), in general harsher policing, expanded imprisonment, and
more efficient courts require more police, more prisons, more judges,
more prosecutors, and so on.
Yet the costs of relatively generous social policy will always far
exceed the costs of relatively harsh penal policy. The reason for this
is simple: penal policy is hyper-targeted. Police arrest only that small
fraction of the public that commits arrestable offenses; prosecutors
charge that smaller fraction that commits offenses deemed worthy
of being charged; and prisons harbor that even smaller fraction of

56  See also Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of
City Life, and the Next War on Violence (New York, N.Y: W. W. Norton & Company,
2018).

36
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

the public that is sentenced to serve time. Moreover, contact with

the criminal justice system is typically occasional. In contrast, social
policy is indiscriminate in both dimensions. To be politically feasible,
it must often be universal. Even at its most targeted, all poor people
are eligible. And when they are eligible, they are usually eligible for
significantly larger fractions of their life: time below the poverty line,
while unemployed, if disabled, during childhood, or after retirement.
One will often hear criminal justice reformers argue that it costs
$40,000 to incarcerate someone, but only $10,000 to educate a child.57
The inference is that penal policy is actually more expensive than
social policy, and thus, that the American state’s decision to fight
crime with prisons and police has nothing to do with its aversion to
redistribution. But while the statistic is correct, the inference does
not follow. This is because the denominators are not equivalent. Penal
spending is hyper-targeted, because the penal system makes less and

CLEGG & USMANI

briefer contact with the population than does the social arm of the
state. And thus, it is much cheaper to build a harsh penal apparatus
than to build a generous welfare state.
Consider some numbers. The United States combines the harshest
penal state in the advanced world with its stingiest welfare state.58 In
the service of mass incarceration, it spends roughly $250 billion a year
on prisons, police, and the courts, at all levels of government. This is
considerably more than any other state in world history. Yet it also
spends upwards of $3 trillion on social policy. Even if we count only
that fraction of social policy which is spent on the poor (i.e., roughly
that fraction which could strictly be tallied as part of the state’s war on
the root causes of crime), the figure is at least $1 trillion.59 To wit, the

57  cnn Money, “Education vs Prison Costs,” online infographic, last accessed De-
cember 2019.
58  See also David Garland, “Penal Controls and Social Controls: Toward a Theory of
American Penal Exceptionalism,” Punishment and Society, 2019; Nicola Lacey, David
Soskice, and David Hope, “Understanding the Determinants of Penal Policy: Crime,
Culture, and Comparative Political Economy,” Annual Review of Criminology 1, no. 1
(2018): 195–217.
59  See, for instance, Robert Rector and Vijay Menon, “Understanding the Hidden

37
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

FIGURE 8: RATIO OF SOCIAL TO PUNITIVE SPENDING AS A

SHARE OF GDP, DEVELOPED COUNTRIES

Denmark
Finland
Norway
Sweden
Austria
France
Japan
Germany
Belgium
Italy
Netherlands
United Kingdom
Spain
Switzerland
United States

0 10 20 30
CLEGG & USMANI

Social Spending / Penal Spending

This figure shows the ratio of social to punitive spending as a percentage of gdp in a
sample of developed countries. Data are from the oecd. The classification of social and
punitive spending thus corresponds to their definitions.

US government spends at least four and perhaps as much as twelve

times more on programs that fight the root causes of crime than on
repressing its symptoms.
The point is not at all that the US welfare state is generous. It is well-
known that it is not.60 Rather, the point is that even underdeveloped

$1.1 Trillion Welfare System and How to Reform It” (Washington, DC: The Heritage
Foundation, April 5, 2018). This figure is the sum of state and federal spending on all
means-tested programs. Because it does not include that fraction of universal spend-
ing (e.g. education, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare) that goes to
the poor, it underestimates what we are trying to capture here.
60  Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A
World of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Lane Kenworthy, Social
Democratic America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

38
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

social policy costs more than overdeveloped penal policy. In all other
advanced capitalist countries, the ratio of social to penal spending is
much higher. As Figure 8 shows, on average, governments in devel-
oped countries spend about twenty-two times more fighting the root
causes of crime than they do on police, prisons, and the courts. By
the oecd’s numbers, the ratio reaches almost forty in Denmark; the
second-lowest (after the United States) is around thirteen (in Swit-
zerland). The point is that waging an all-out war on the root causes
of crime is equivalent to the task of building a large, redistributive
welfare state that takes from the rich to give to the poor.
The problem in the 1960s was not even that liberals made no effort
in this direction. In fact, liberals were not just verbally committed to
policies that Hinton and Murakawa argue they disparaged. They were
also committed to these policies in deed. In the 1960s, federal expen-
ditures on social programs grew far more than federal expenditures

CLEGG & USMANI

on police, prisons, and the courts. In 1962, the Kennedy administra-
tion’s first full year in government, the federal government spent
about $13.81 (or 0.37 percent of total spending) per person on punitive
programs, and about $837.05 (or 22.5 percent) on social programs (all
in 2016 dollars). In 1968, in Johnson’s final full year, the federal gov-
ernment spent $17.19 (or 0.36 percent) and $1,367.71 (or 28.8 percent),
respectively. In real terms, this amounts to an increase of 25 percent
in per capita punitive spending and 63 percent in per capita social
spending. And because total spending was increasing significantly
over this period, this small increase in per capita punitive spending
could equivalently be represented as a decline in the percentage of
total spending that went to punitive ends of about 2.6 percent (while
even in these terms, social spending increased by 28 percent).61
These numbers should not be surprising. Many of the major
advances in the American welfare state were products of this period
(e.g., Medicare and Medicaid, a more generous Social Security

61  Authors’ own calculations. Data come from the Census of State and Local Govern-
ments, the White House, and usafacts.org.

39
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

program, increased federal aid to public education). It is true that

the Johnson administration modernized and expanded the state’s
punitive arms, but in general this was compatible with a genuinely
liberal view of the source of social disorder. As the report of the Kat-
zenbach and Kerner Commissions argued, some of the problems of
urban crime could be attributed to the fact that existing law enforce-
ment agencies were unprofessional, underpaid, and ignored black
victims. In fact, this last complaint was made vociferously by Martin
Luther King Jr in a 1965 piece on the Watts riots, writing: “The most
grievous charge against municipal police is not brutality, though
it exists. Permissive crime in ghettos is the nightmare of the slum
family … Because no one, including the police, cares particularly
about ghetto crime, it pervades every area of life.”62 Liberals’ desire
to build a law enforcement apparatus free of these flaws is worth
distinguishing from the punitive commonsense that would soon
CLEGG & USMANI

colonize American politics.

Thus, liberals did not fail to imagine what ought to have been done.
Nor did they fail to attempt to do what ought to have been done. So
why, exactly, did they fail? At root the issue is not one of attitudes or
motivation, but capacity. The ultimate causes of liberal failure lie
outside the state, in the incapacity of the American poor to compel
redistribution from the rich. As we argue below, this incapacity was
in part conjunctural. The social movements of the 1960s reshaped
America, but they sought redistribution from a Johnson administra-
tion wedded to imperialist misadventure and to a Keynesian compact
that pegged social spending to investor confidence. Yet much more
important, we argue, were long-standing incapacities. By the 1930s,
America was already well-established as a welfare laggard. The rise in
crime that began in the 1960s was the bitter fruit of decades of a failed
policy response to the problems of American modernization. Ulti-
mately, the explanation of this enduring failure lies in the enduring

62  Martin Luther King Jr, “Beyond the Los Angeles Riot,” The Saturday Review, No-
vember 13, 1965, 34.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

constraints on social policy in the United States. And it is here, in

these major and abiding limits to redistribution, that lies the key to
understanding American mass incarceration.

Guns Or Butter

In the 1960s, left-wing elements inside and outside the Democratic

Party were demanding a massive expansion of the welfare state. This
was what the crises of the 1960s required, they argued. This is clearest
in the exemplary ambitions of the Freedom Budget, which made a
federally funded and federally administered jobs program the center-
piece of its policy agenda.63 But this expansion was not forthcoming,
for two kinds of reasons.
First, as the early 1960s turned to the late 1960s, the clout of the
two constituencies demanding this expansive social policy, the labor

CLEGG & USMANI

and civil rights movements, were flagging. The labor movement was
groaning under the weight of bureaucratization, after having been
kneecapped by the McCarthyite attacks of the previous decades. And
the Civil Rights Movement never found a way to move, in Bayard
Rustin’s pithy mandate, from protest to politics.
Their weakness was exacerbated by the structure of the Dem-
ocratic Party, which was never a social-democratic party on the
European model, but a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats
and Northern liberals. In the mid-1960s, thanks to the social move-
ments that were bubbling around it, it had mustered something like
a social-democratic agenda. But these movements never had more
than a tenuous hold on the party establishment itself, which limited
severely what they could win.
Second, the Johnson administration worried that redistribution
from rich to poor would spook investors. During the boom-time
economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s, the Kennedy and Johnson

63  A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, “A Freedom Budget for All Americans: A
Summary” (New York, NY: A. Philip Randolph Institute, 1966).

41
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

administrations had managed to expand government spending

without burdening taxpayers — what Doris Goodwin calls “reactionary
Keynesianism.”64 This compact fell apart as the economy began to
sputter. In the verdict of Bruce Schulman, Johnson’s administration
had financed “simultaneous wars against communism and poverty
… through a dangerous fiscal sleight of hand.”65 It was only in 1967,
several years into both wars, that Johnson finally did ask Congress
for tax increases. And when he did, these were mostly to finance the
war in Vietnam, in exchange for what Schulman calls “savage cuts in
Great Society spending.” Social spending was profoundly limited by
the demands of the war. Imperialism abroad killed reform at home.
And once the liberal moment of the mid-1960s had passed, any
significant expansion of America’s social-democratic state was sig-
nificantly less likely.66 The labor and civil rights movements declined
further. Republican administrations would not even try to fight the
CLEGG & USMANI

root causes of crime, and Democrats’ efforts to do so were ever more

weak-kneed. The partisan divide on crime thus slowly closed, a trend
most visible after the Dukakis debacle and under Bill Clinton in the
1990s. The American welfare state would never grow to do what lib-
erals had hoped but failed to do in the mid-1960s.

A Tale Of Two Exceptions

However, the incapacities of the American state were not mainly the
result of conjunctural facts about the 1960s. It is tempting to regard
this decade as a missed moment, when the federal government failed

64  Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Si-
mon and Schuster, 1991).
65  Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biogra-
phy with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 2006).
66  This is not to argue that American social programs ceased to grow. As Figure 9
suggests, they did continue to increase in size (as a fraction of gdp). Rather, it is to
argue that, with the close of this era, so vanished the prospects for closing the gap to
the European model.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

FIGURE 9: SOCIAL TRANSFERS AS A SHARE OF GDP, DEVEL-

OPED COUNTRIES, 1878–1998

30

USA Developed Countries

Social Transfers as % of GDP

20

10

1875 1900 1925 1950 1975 2000

This figure shows the share of gdp devoted to social transfers in a sample of developed

CLEGG & USMANI

countries, over the course of their development. Data (and definitions) are from Lindert,
Growing Public.

to avert mass incarceration. This overstates the case. Less people

would be languishing in American prisons had the Left won the bat-
tles it lost, but the struggles of the 1960s were not decisive as much
as they were illustrative.
By 1960, America was already well-established as a welfare lag-
gard. As Figure 9 shows, the gap between the United States and the
rest of the advanced world dates to the first few decades of the twen-
tieth century. This was a period of massive working-class agitation in
Europe with no real parallel in the United States. The United States
was indistinguishable from other countries in the extent of public
social transfers in 1890. In a world with very little redistribution, it
spent about 1.3 times what the median developed country did on
social transfers (as a percentage of gdp). By 1930, it spent half. This
ratio would change very little over the next few decades.67

67  Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public: Volume 1, The Story: Social Spending and Eco-

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

As we have argued in this essay, modernization in America had

yielded some unique social problems — most notably, the challenge
of integrating the Southern, black peasantry into cities that had
already passed through an industrial boom, populated by native
and immigrant whites. High and rising rates of violence in American
cities were a symptom of this problem, exacerbated by the postwar
baby boom. These social problems demanded social policy remedies.
What should concern us, analytically, is not the specific failure of
1960s liberals to take this path, but the long-standing failure of prior
and successive American administrations to do so. It is the long-run
underdevelopment of social policy over the twentieth century that
yielded the high violence and harsh punishment that characterizes
the United States today.
In short, we are arguing that American exceptionalism in violence
and punishment is a symptom of America’s exceptional history.
CLEGG & USMANI

America has so many prisoners because its development path yielded

some unique social problems, while its political economy prohibits
redistribution from rich to poor on the European model. In a sen-
tence, the story of American mass incarceration is the story of the
underdevelopment of American social democracy.

The Origins Of Mass Incarceration

Of course, America’s carceral state was not constructed during the

Johnson years. When Nixon took office in 1968, the incarceration
rate was only 102 per 100,000. The seven-fold increase in the rate of
incarceration happened subsequently, over several decades. So there
is still something left to explain. How does the underdevelopment of
social policy explain the metastasis of the American carceral state?
First, one must recognize that this state has not been built by the
federal government. It is not the result of any one decision taken by a

nomic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

44
 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

president or Congress. Federal actors may have made some difference

on the margins, since they redirected funding, organized research
and development, and fought a disproportionate share of the War on
Drugs. But most of the federal bills are symptoms rather than drivers
of the nationwide punitive turn. States and localities house 88 per-
cent of America’s prisoners, employ about 81 percent of American
police officers, and spend 79 percent of total money spent on police,
prisons, and the courts.68 Mass incarceration is better understood as
the sum of all actions taken at these levels, by a cast of Republican
and Democratic state legislatures, governors, district attorneys, police
officers, and judges.
The failure at the federal level thus matters not because the federal
government was the proximate agent of mass incarceration. It was
not: neither under Johnson nor under later administrations. Rather,
it matters because the persistent failure of the federal government to

CLEGG & USMANI

attack the root causes of crime left the task of managing the rise in
crime to state and local governments. In this climate of high anxiety
about crime, state and local legislators, mayors, city officials, prosecu-
tors, and sheriffs made careers out of responding to a panicking public.
Of course, one might wonder why local and state governments all
responded in punitive ways. Could not some of these governments
have launched the affirmative, social policy response that the federal
government could not muster?
One of the reasons for this is simply institutional. In the division of
labor that characterizes American federalism, police, prisons, and the
courts are mostly the responsibility of the states and municipalities,
while most of the major social programs in American history have
been invented and funded at the federal level. When local and state
officials were bombarded by panicking electorates, it is no surprise
that it was mainly to these tools that they would turn.
However, this is not the whole story. After all, some states and

68  Data on prisoners are from the Vera Institute. Data on police officers are from the
Bureau of Justice Studies. Data on punitive spending are from usafacts.org.

45
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

municipalities do attempt to craft their own social policies. They can

raise taxes and spend in redistributive ways. Thus, another answer is
that they were subject to the same constraint that bound the federal
government: the absence of a constituency that could force the rich
to give to the poor.
But consider, in addition, two other facts that make redistributive
policy difficult for states and localities. First, the rich live in certain
areas but not in others. Thus, local officials in poor areas cannot raise
the kind of revenue that the federal government can. Even if the mayor
of Ferguson had the gall to tax and redistribute to fight the root causes
of crime in his area, he could never tax San Francisco’s billionaires.
The perverse consequence of American federalism is that it is those
areas in which violence concentrates that have the least resources to
fight it at its root. Second, as was evident in the 1960s, the local state
is especially vulnerable to the flight of its tax base. The costs of fleeing
CLEGG & USMANI

the federal state are much higher than the costs of fleeing local taxes,
since the rich only have to jump across jurisdictional boundaries
(e.g., move to the suburbs). This, too, condemns localities to cheap
and thus punitive solutions.

RACIAL INEQUALI T Y

Our argument thus far has explained why incarceration grew and also
why America is exceptionally punitive, but we have yet to say very
much about inequalities in exposure to police and prisons. Why are
certain groups of Americans — and in particular, black Americans —
so much more likely to fall foul of America’s carceral state? Racial
disparities have declined slightly in the last two decades, but even
over this period the black-white ratio has never fallen below five.
There are few more important questions to pose about American
punishment than this one.
One common answer is that these disparities are explained by the
biases of police officers, prosecutors, juries, judges, and politicians.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

This amounts to the claim that, conditional on having committed an

offense, black defendants are more likely to be arrested, more likely
to be charged, more likely to be convicted, more likely to receive
longer sentences. There is certainly evidence that each of these dis-
parities exist.
Yet, what is relevant is not just whether they exist but how much
they can explain. For instance, evidence from federal courts suggests
that judges sentence black defendants to sentences that are 10 percent
longer than otherwise-equivalent white defendants.69 One can take
this as a rough index of judges’ biases, explicit and implicit. But given
that the overall disparity in the stock of prisoners is about 500 percent,
this would be equivalent to noting that the biases of judges explain
only about 2 percent of the total racial disparity in incarceration
(10/500 = 2 percent). In fact, our best evidence suggests that biases
at every stage, from arrest to sentencing, explain much less of the

CLEGG & USMANI

total racial inequality in punishment than is commonly assumed.70
One estimate, which compares baseline estimates of offending to
disparities in incarceration rates, finds that around 70–75 percent
of the black-white disparity in incarceration is explained by the fact
that black Americans are more likely to commit criminal offenses.71
Here, of course, it is natural to worry that we have no reliable mea-
sures of disparities in offending. After all, police reports and arrest
records may be prone to racial bias either because police are individ-
ually prejudiced (and thus more likely to arrest African Americans)

69  M. Marit Rehavi and Sonja B. Starr, “Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Sentenc-
es,” Journal of Political Economy 122, no. 6 (December 2014): 1320–54.
70  Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson, “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime,
and Urban Inequality,” in Crime and Inequality, ed. John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 37–56; Michael Tonry and Matthew
Melewski, “The Malign Effects of Drug and Crime Control Policies on Black Ameri-
cans,” Crime and Justice 37, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 1–44.
71  Allen J. Beck and Alfred Blumstein, “Racial Disproportionality in U.S. State Pris-
ons: Accounting for the Effects of Racial and Ethnic Differences in Criminal Involve-
ment, Arrests, Sentencing, and Time Served,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 34,
no. 3 (September 2018): 876.

47
 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

or because police departments focus their activities in black neigh-

borhoods (and are thus more likely to come into contact with African
Americans). But concerns about racial bias in police data can be miti-
gated by relying on multiple and independent sources. We know from
court records and witness reports, for instance, that the vast majority
(roughly 90 percent) of homicides are intra-racial. Arrest records of
suspects can thus be reasonably checked against racial disparities (in
victimization) derived from coroner’s reports. In 1970, for instance,
coroners indicate that African Americans were nine times more likely
to be murdered as whites, while they were eleven times more likely to
be arrested for murder in the same year. By 1980 the ratio had fallen
to 5.7 for victimization and 5.9 for arrests.72
Furthermore, if cross-sectional disparities in offending between
blacks and whites are consistently very large, they are also histori-
cally specific. Racial disparities before the twentieth century ran in
CLEGG & USMANI

the other direction. White Americans killed each other at higher rates
before 1900.73 Thus, any explanation of racial disparities in violence
must account for their twentieth century provenance, which is but
one reason that biological or other racist explanations of these dis-
parities are a nonstarter.
So where do these disparities come from? The arguments of the
previous sections furnish an answer. Behind racial disparities in
offending lies long-standing inequality in life circumstances. African
Americans are overrepresented in crime because they are more likely
to live in America’s worst neighborhoods, at the bottom of its stretched

72  National Center for Health Statistics, “Table 029: Death rates for homicide, by sex,
race, Hispanic origin, and age: United States, selected years 1950–2015” in Health,
United States, 2018 (Hyattsville, Maryland: CDC, 2019). LaFree, “Race and Crime
Trends in the United States, 1946–1990.” For face-to-face crimes in which victims
were able to perceive the race of the offender (which includes most violent crimes) po-
lice reports can also be compared to victimization surveys. Here, again, the literature
has shown that, for non-drug offenses, these sources are roughly in agreement (Tonry
and Melewski, “The Malign Effects of Drug and Crime Control Policies on Black Amer-
icans,” 6–7; Beck and Blumstein “Racial Disproportionality in U.S. State Prisons”).
73  Roth, American Homicide, 201–225.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

class structure, with few opportunities to escape, and few public

resources available for their self-development or safety.
Critics of mass incarceration often ignore crime because they
worry that acknowledging it would be to blame mass incarceration
on individual choices.74 But this does not follow. To blame individ-
uals, one must make the additional, nonobvious argument that they
are responsible for the antecedent causes of their crime. In a society
in which the vast majority of criminal offenders are drawn from the
bottom of its class structure and trapped in its worst neighborhoods,
this is a risible proposition. Crime is an index of oppression. Blame
thus misses the point. It is altogether unfortunate that those who are
alive to this oppression would deny its consequences. The Left is not
wrong to denounce accounts which blame criminals for crime (or
African Americans for their disproportionate representation in the
ranks of offenders). Yet nothing in this denunciation requires us to

CLEGG & USMANI

ignore the reality of crime and violence.
This neglect of crime by critics of mass incarceration has costly
political consequences. In the absence of serious critical commentary
on the issue, conservative common sense has thrived. Most impor-
tantly, by leading progressives to misdiagnose the source of racial
disparities in punishment, it makes it impossible to wage effective war
against them. Racial disparities are mostly not a result of the injustice
of biased treatment inside the criminal justice system, but rather the
foundational injustice of American racial inequality outside it. The
remedy must be equivalently foundational: not merely the retraining
of police, prosecutors, and judges, but a redistributive attack on the
roots of inequality by race and place.

74  This is particularly true of racial disparities in offending, even the recognition
of which is sometimes considered victim-blaming at best, racist at worst (Sampson
and Wilson, “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality.”). It is true that
such racial disparities are a favorite topic of racists (Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The
Condemnation of Blackness [Harvard University Press, 2011]). But recognizing the re-
ality of racial disparities in offending does not make spurious explanations of these
disparities any less spurious.

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

One might argue that racism matters because it has blocked pre-
cisely this magnitude of redistribution. Forman suggests this in his
recent book on Washington, DC, in which black elected officials failed
to win their “all-of-the-above” policy agenda (both social policy and
punitive policy) because of the racism of the white establishment.75
And in fact a host of work notes the unpopularity of American social
programs when they are perceived to benefit black Americans.76
But this revision does not take the barriers to social policy seri-
ously enough. As we have argued, nonpunitive remedies to American
violence demand massive, unprecedented redistribution from rich
to poor. In Washington, DC and like cases, what is relevant is not the
prejudice of the rich and the white but the powerlessness of the poor
and the black. As Stokely Carmichael once quipped, “if a white man
wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch
me, that’s my problem.” What African Americans specifically (and
CLEGG & USMANI

poor Americans, more generally) lacked, as the 1960s turned to the

1970s, was leverage over American elites. As the economy sputtered,
cities hemorrhaged revenue, states reorganized around powerful
suburban constituencies, and the labor and civil rights movements
collapsed, the prospects for American social democracy grew ever
fainter. In a world in which, somehow, black Americans had acquired
new, sufficient leverage, no amount of white prejudice could have
stood in their way. Tragically, the same forces that decimated black
communities and yielded the rise in violence (deindustrialization,
flight of white Americans and many middle-class blacks from city
centers) also sapped poor, working-class black Americans of most of
their economic and political power.
Given this, how should we think about the causal relevance of
race to American mass incarceration? In our view, it matters mostly
in ways both less direct and more basic. Race is relevant because it is

75  Forman Jr, Locking Up Our Own, 12.

76  Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Anti-
poverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

our best explanation for the absence of a working-class movement on

the American continent, and thus the persistent underdevelopment of
American social policy.77 American slavery and then Jim Crow delayed
the proletarianization of African Americans, with the result that they
arrived in Northern cities after the first wave of American industri-
alization, in urban environments in which pivotal, scarce resources
(jobs and housing) were hoarded by the first and second generations of
established white ethnics. This was an environment destined to yield
working-class disunity. Black Americans strove to penetrate well-pro-
tected labor and housing markets. It was no surprise that established
incumbents would craft caste-based remedies to exclude them. Such
strategies were rational, even if suboptimal in the long run.
In this sense, partisans of the standard story are not wrong to
link American mass incarceration to American slavery. But they are
connected not because slavery established some transhistorical imper-

CLEGG & USMANI

ative that America be always a land of white domination. Rather, they
are connected because the plantation economy tied African-American
labor to the land until 1940. Blacks were thus bypassed by America’s
industrial boom. They are connected also because slavery was largely
responsible for an American federalism which assigns law enforce-
ment to those parts of the state least capable of paying the higher
costs of redistributive remedies.78 In the final reckoning, the story
of the twin exceptions that have been the subject of this essay starts
with this history.

Looking Forward

What is to be done about American crime and punishment today?

Remedies run in two domains: criminal justice reform and reforms to

77  Similar arguments can be found in Gary Marks and Seymour Martin Lipset, It
Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton & Co, 2000); Alesina and Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe.
78  Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008).

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 CATALYST • VOL 3 • №3

social policy. Most of the contemporary discussion has focused on the

first. Those on the Left (but also some on the Right) have argued that
the criminal justice system has become too overbearing, too harsh, too
intrusive, and too punitive. This is undoubtedly true. The American
carceral state is degrading and inhumane. Reforms to make it less
so — humane conditions of confinement, shorter sentences, easier
parole, decriminalization of key offenses, less aggressive policing —
are urgently needed.
But there are two important points that the current reform conver-
sation often elides. First, most of the people inside American prisons
have committed serious offenses. Overbearing punitive intervention
in their lives is an injustice, but so too would be hands-off neglect. A
judicious treatment of their problems will require a radical rethinking
of the very purpose of the penal system. Sadly, the views of the Amer-
ican left on punishment are often more American than left-wing.
CLEGG & USMANI

Leftists, too, talk of victims’ rights, and demand retribution from

guilty offenders. These impulses are understandable, but they are
also draconian. Those who commit violent offenses are themselves
victims of facts beyond their control, whether of inheritance or cir-
cumstance. The appropriate response is not to punish or to shame,
but to repair and rehabilitate while safeguarding the public.79 In this
process, victims have no position of privilege; they deserve care and
compensation for their trauma and loss, but society’s debts to them
should be paid separately. The specifics might be arguable, but the
overall point is that reformers, left and right, have washed their hands
of this problem by centering reform efforts on the easy cases (e.g.
the nonviolent drug offender). This can actually amplify reigning
intuitions about punishment in harder cases, which is where reform
efforts will have to reach if they are to be effective.80

79  Gregg D. Caruso, “Free Will Skepticism and Criminal Behavior: A Public
Health-Quarantine Model,” Southwest Philosophy Review 32, no. 1 (2016): 25–48; Bar-
bara Fried, “Beyond Blame,” Boston Review, June 2013.
80  Christopher Seeds, “Bifurcation Nation: American Penal Policy in Late Mass In-
carceration,” Punishment & Society, October 19, 2016, 590–610.

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 THE ECONOMIC ORIGINS OF MASS INCARCERATION

Second, and more importantly, if we are right that the over-

development of the American penal state is a symptom of the
underdevelopment of the American social policy, meaningful reform
is in large part the task of winning redistribution from ruling elites . It
will be costly. And there will thus be losers, who will resist it. The end
of American mass incarceration is not a technical problem for which
there are smart, straightforward, but just not-yet-realized solutions.
Rather, it is a political problem, the solution of which will require
confronting the entrenched power of the wealthy. In this sense, the
task before us is to build the capacities of poor and working-class
Americans to win redress from their exploiters. 

CLEGG & USMANI

53