by Eric Seligman and Brian Nam-Sonenstein

One of the ways that mass incarceration traps people in poverty is by raising the stakes of unemployment for all workers, creating immense obstacles to organizing for better terms of employment. Rather than alleviate poverty through jobs, housing, education, and healthcare, the U.S. uses criminalization to force people to comply with a deeply unequal economy.

Mass Incarceration Raises the Stakes of Unemployment for All Workers

Mass incarceration emerged as the U.S. economy grew more unequal and work became more precarious: In 1973, the wealthiest 10% of Americans captured one-third of all income, but nearly 40 years later they had captured one-half of it. In that time, the ultra-rich top 1% went from holding 9% of all income to nearly a quarter of it. Meanwhile, at least 17% of workers toiled under unstable work schedules in 2015. The growth of the criminal legal system, combined with rising inequality and the demise of the social safety net, has made unemployment riskier and weakened workers’ bargaining position. If losing your job means you’ll receive meaningful financial support before your next job, you’ll be more likely to risk retaliation from an angry employer to demand higher wages and better conditions. If losing your job may lead to an indefinite period of austerity, stress, and surveillance that could end in arrest and incarceration, you’ll be less likely to risk making such demands. In a recent study of labor markets in high-incarceration communities, Adam Reich and Seth J. Prins find that the more incarceration there is in a community, the less likely people are to risk their jobs demanding better terms of work, regardless of prior experiences with incarceration. In other words, in neighborhoods where incarceration is more common, workers—formerly incarcerated or not—are more inclined to play it safe at work than risk unemployment and incarceration.

Suppressing the Wages of Formerly Incarcerated People Harms All Low-Wage Workers

As mass incarceration restricts job opportunities for formerly incarcerated people, it creates a feedback loop that suppresses wages for everyone. Here’s how it works: limited job options threaten formerly incarcerated workers with deeper poverty, criminalization, and re-incarceration, and makes them especially dependent on those few employers who are willing to hire them. As a result, they are compelled to accept nearly whatever wages or conditions are offered to them. Employers can then use this group of precarious workers to threaten others with replacement if they dare to demand higher wages and better conditions. Among the more than 50,000 people released from federal prisons in 2010, a staggering 33% found no employment at all over four years post-release and no more than 40% were employed at any given time. Successfully landing a job also had limited benefits: formerly incarcerated workers averaged 3.4 jobs between 2010 and 2014—in other words, they secured jobs that didn’t offer security or upward mobility. These jobs tended to be the lowest-paying positions. An analysis of IRS data by the Brookings Institution found most employed people recently released from prison receive an income well below the poverty line. Everyone suffers when employers can readily threaten to fire a worker and hire from the highly vulnerable formerly incarcerated pool, forcing everyone to accept less money and worse treatment.

Mass Incarceration Makes It Harder for All Workers to Unionize

Higher unionization rates lead to higher wages throughout the economy because, in places where businesses have unionized, other employers must pay more to compete for local workers. Unions are also an equalizing force, reducing racial and gender economic disparity and increasing political participation. Mass incarceration undermines these benefits by preventing workers from leveraging their collective power through unions or other worker associations that can more safely and effectively make demands of employers. Reich and Prins’s 2020 study offers the first large-scale documentation of this effect: they found individuals with a history of incarceration were 85% less likely to join the OUR Walmart workers association. They also discovered people who had experienced any contact with the criminal legal system (including felony convictions, probation or parole, or incarceration) were 76% less likely to join the organization. According to their analysis, as prison admissions rose, the odds of signing an OUR Walmart membership card fell. Union approval elections were also less likely to succeed in communities with higher incarceration rates regardless of whether the workers involved in that particular election had been previously incarcerated. The chilling effect of mass incarceration on labor organizing pervades throughout the entire low-wage labor market, affecting all workers. Beyond the increased risk associated with losing one’s job, there are likely other reasons for this dynamic, such as incarceration’s suppressing effect on the community networks and institutions where labor organizing often takes place.

Mass Incarceration Weakens Political Movements for Economic Justice

Finally, mass incarceration’s coercive power, rooted in its ability to exclude and impoverish, seriously undermines political movements for the rights of the most marginalized, who have the most at stake in economic reform. By reframing systemic inequalities as individual failures and criminality, the narratives built around prisons stoke the flames of racism and pit people with similar economic interests against one another. In this environment, our weakened political movements cannot win or maintain the social programs that would help nearly all of us, and that the vast majority of people want.

Mass Incarceration Is
Anti-Democratic, Suppressing Political Engagement and Representation

Disenfranchisement laws prevent people who have the most intimate understanding of poverty in the U.S.—and the most at stake in economic reform—from participating in elections. According to the Sentencing Project, as of 2020, an estimated 5.17 million people—1 out of every 44 adults in the entire eligible voting population—lost their right to vote due to a felony conviction. Prison gerrymandering also disempowers the communities from which people are incarcerated: by counting incarcerated people where they’re imprisoned instead of where they’re from, the Census Bureau dramatically distorts political representation at the state and local level, and paints an inaccurate picture of community populations for research and planning purposes.

Incarcerated people and their communities are shunned from the political process. Incarcerated people and their communities are also shunned from the political process in ways beyond legal disenfranchisement. The many stresses of returning from prison lead many individuals—and entire high-incarceration communities—to significantly retreat from formal politics and from the more informal processes of shaping the institutions that structure their lives. According to a 2010 study by scholars Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman, contact with the criminal legal system is strongly and consistently associated with declining trust in government and a reduction in one’s likelihood of voting, even when the sample is restricted to those who have not been legally disenfranchised. Other research confirms this effect encourages not just individual disengagement from politics but the withdrawal of entire communities from politics and more informal forms of neighborhood involvement.

Mass Incarceration Weakens Labor Unions, Removing a Key Player in Broader Movements for Economic Justice

Organized labor has traditionally been a key player in movements for just economic policies. Beyond providing a gateway for members to build confidence in the possibility of organizing around shared interests to change policy, unions have often provided the actual institutional structure that organizes the public for economic justice. According to a 2021 study from the Economic Policy Institute, the 17 states with the highest union densities have, on average:

State minimum wages that are 19% higher than the national average—40% higher than low-union-density states; and

Median annual incomes $6,000 higher than the national average; and

A higher share of unemployed workers receiving unemployment insurance; and

An uninsured population 4.5 percentage points lower than that of low-union-density states; and

A higher likelihood of passing paid sick leave laws and paid family and medical leave laws than states with lower union densities; and

Significantly fewer restrictive voting laws.

Police and corrections officers provide stark examples of how powerful organized workers can be, though these unions’ relationship with the criminal legal system tends to lead to positions that do not serve the interest of all workers.

In some states, law enforcement organizations play a very significant role in electoral politics, often as main contributors to major campaigns. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, for example, has contributed more than $9.3 million to political campaigns in the last 20 years—$3.8 million of which was spent across 32 state legislative races since the year 2000 alone. Over the past year, the California guards union negotiated a $1 billion raise over three years and got a new, additional state-funded retirement perk. In addition to pushing legislation directly responsible for expanding California’s prison system, the organization bankrolled particular victims rights groups that have helped stoke fears of criminalized people.

Imagine if those sectors of the workforce that articulate more progressive policies for economic justice were as organized and politically active as the California prison workers union. By making it harder for most workers to unionize—while also empowering those segments of labor with a vested interest in the criminal legal system—mass incarceration removes a key player from political movements for economic justice.

Mass Incarceration Inflames Social Tensions That Undermine Worker Solidarity

Throughout U.S. history, racism has prevented the development of a fully united movement for workers’ rights. Mass incarceration has continued this tradition by reinforcing divisions that obscure a shared interest in policy reforms. Prisons are home to racially disproportionate outcomes and a heated debate about their causes that plays out in media, exacerbating racism in society. Labor market research that finds that employers more frequently assume criminality in Black job applicants, whether they have a criminal record or not, exemplifies how mass incarceration influences society’s ideas and relationships around race in the workplace. Relatedly, the monumental scale of punishment in the U.S. leads to a hardening of ideas about workers who are “law-abiding” and those who are not, creating deep cultural rifts that leave less room for organizing around common grievances. While many workers and incarcerated people often share very similar needs for economic reform—like more affordable housing, education, or healthcare—the strength of their divisions along the lines of “criminality” tend to overpower the possibility of solidarity around shared needs.

Mass Incarceration Hides Economic Injustice, Making It Harder To Organize Against

While mass incarceration creates some very visible economic injustices, others remain hidden, and when the public can’t readily see injustice or accurately pinpoint its source, it is harder to organize people against it. For example, mass incarceration artificially lowers official unemployment rates as incarcerated people go uncounted. Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett show that, in the 1990s, mass incarceration lowered the unemployment rate for Black men by 7 full percentage points. The ’90s are generally celebrated as a booming time for the U.S. economy with increasing employment opportunities for people of color. However, if incarcerated people were included in these statistics, the jobless rate for Black men would have stayed at an appalling 40% between the official unemployment peak in the early 1980s and the “inclusive” mid-1990s. Furthermore, if these figures and economic policy targets were recalculated to include the prison population, it would be even clearer just how little our society spends on social programs to address dire economic problems.

Beyond statistical misrepresentation, mass incarceration also gives rise to narratives that displace blame for criminalized poverty entirely onto the individual. Despite the vast amount of research on the role of economic conditions in causing crime, criminal legal proceedings present many symptoms of poverty, unemployment, and homelessness not as economic problems to be alleviated through systemic policy changes, but as personal failings that must be forcefully punished. This “individualization” of structural problems is also very clear in reentry. One can only counsel so many exceptionally persistent formerly incarcerated job applicants—who are indeed more “active” in the labor market than their general population peers—on how to beat out other workers before it becomes clear that the lack of economic opportunities that would allow them (and all workers) to meaningfully support themselves is really to blame. Bruce Western’s Homeward and Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore’s “Carceral Chicago” are full of painful stories of individuals stuck in these situations, making heroic individual efforts amid a scarcity of opportunities. In this situation, a certain percentage of people are guaranteed to end up unemployed, and demanding fiercer competition among them will not change this fact. It will, however, continue the pattern of filling prisons by blaming individuals for structural economic problems.  

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