Mass Incarceration

Mass incarceration enters the wiki through Evicted, where Matthew Desmond uses it as the male analogue to eviction. His central parallel: “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.” The two systems are gendered and racialized mirror images of the same machinery of exclusion.

The mechanism Desmond highlights is how a criminal record compounds disadvantage in the housing market. Even landlords who “tried to avoid discriminating by setting clear criteria and holding all applicants to the same standards” reproduced inequality, “because black men were disproportionately incarcerated and black women disproportionately evicted, uniformly denying housing to applicants with recent criminal or conviction records still had an incommensurate impact on African Americans.” So neutral-seeming screening rules transmit the effects of mass incarceration into Racial Segregation in housing — while a white couple with felony convictions, evictions, and an outstanding warrant gets approved “because they were white.” The concept links Desmond’s housing argument to the broader cycle of Poverty reproduction.

Context: “Mass incarceration” refers to the dramatic rise in U.S. imprisonment since the 1970s, which gave the United States the world’s highest incarceration rate and fell disproportionately on Black men — the subject of works like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

Where this appears

• Evicted — the male counterpart to eviction (“locked up… locked out”), and the reason criminal-record housing screens fall hardest on African Americans.
• Juvenile-in-Justice (richardross.net/juvenile-in-justice; juvenile-in-justice.com) — Richard Ross’s photography project on young people in American juvenile detention and correctional facilities. By the project’s count it covers 300 sites in 35 states and more than 1,000 young people over a dozen years. It pairs portraits with interviews so that the “53,000+ children in custody every day” are seen as people, not only as a statistic.

From Roam

• Reform
  • https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/jay-zs-roc-nation-and-first-round-capital-invest-3-million-in-bail-reform-startup-promise/
  • https://www.axios.com/prison-poverty-economic-inequality-cycle-4a3ad7a5-b62c-48e6-ab37-36eb4b231f7d.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosprorata&stream=top-stories

From “Things To Internet”

Counter-argument: the “Ferguson effect”

The claim that protest against police after the 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri made officers pull back and violent crime rise. St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson used the phrase in late 2014; Heather Mac Donald’s May 29, 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed brought it to a national audience. The claim is contested (Wikipedia). Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. mid-2015).