Does America’s Prison Policy Harm Democracy?

Political scientists Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman have recently completed a study that looks at the effect that imprisonment has on an individual’s willingness to vote or otherwise participate in civic life.

What they found was both intriguing and troubling.

In brief, in their study “”The Political Consequences of the Carceral State,” Weaver and Lerman discovered that:

…. individuals retreat from political life further and further with encounters
with the carceral state; if we expand out and see what that means in the aggregate, it suggests that incarceration is actually undermining participatory democracy.

(They are not, by the way, focusing on the fact that, in many states, felons can no longer vote—which is the area that other social scientists have explored. They look well beyond that point to note that even reasonably transitory contact with law enforcement often has a sadly dampening effect when it comes to civic participation.)

The two women are now expanding their research into a book, which will allow them to more fully tease apart what appears to be the complex relationship between incarceration and the democratic process.

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WHAT HAPPENS TO CIVIC HEALTH WHEN YOU LOCK UP MORE AND MORE OF YOUR CITIZENRY?

As most of you know (because I tend to hector on the topic), right now in the United States we are incarcerating a greater percentage of our citizens than we did at any other time in US history.

More than one in 100 Americans is in prison. Nine million citizens pass through American jails each year.

Fifteen percent of the population will serve time behind bars at some point in our lives—making veterans of prison more numerous in the population than veterans of military duty.

Minority communities bear a disproportionate brunt of the rise in incarceration rates. One in three African-American men born in 2001 can expect to spend some time in prison during his lifetime.

In the past few years, there has been some very good research into how this trend—that more and more criminal justice experts are coming to view as an over-reliance on incarceration—affects individuals, families and the stability of communities.

Even more recently, the press has finally grabbed on to the idea that our prison fever has wreaked havoc with our already over-stretched state budgets, a situation made worse in a bad economy.

But no one has looked at the effect of our expanding “incarcerated class” on government and the health of the body politic.

With their study, Weaver and Lerman have taken a leap into those waters.

Have a look.

Also, journalist Colin Asher (whose essay flags the study) makes an interesting point. Since as Weaver and Lerman note, the increased in incarceration is largely policy driven, not crime driven (That’s a whole different topic, but just for the moment take my word for it.) So—Asher wonders—have we inadvertently “… created a sort of feedback loop, whereby legislation is passed, and once a group is affected by that legislation they become less likely to participate in the political system—and then more legislation is passed, and it affects the same group because they no longer advocate for themselves…”

I think it’s more complicated than that. But the concept is nonetheless worth examining.