When History Is Not History: The Politics of Crime Control and Thick Injustice

Issues of crime and crime control make mostly fleeting appearances in the volume, in reference, for example, to the “unequal vulnerability to crime” (Stephen Macedo, p. 50) and attendant health consequences (Richard Thompson Ford) that result from thick injustice. They appear most prominently in Clarence N. Stone's description of Boston's Operation Ceasefire as an example of social investment; Gerald Frug's discussion of felon disenfranchisement as one instance of rules that exclude groups from “membership in the political community” (p. 217); and Margaret Weir's brief reference to the ways in which “the dramatic growth in the prison population, the sharply restricted employment opportunities for those released from prison, and the legal limits on their political engagement” amplify the “potential for extrusion” (p. 251) resulting from the movement of the poor, especially African Americans, into the suburbs.

Yet returning to the three themes highlighted at the onset of Justice and the American Metropolis—history, the local, and spatiality—deeper interrogation of the relationship of these to crime control further complicates the picture of thick injustice. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander makes a compelling case for understanding sweeping trends in mass incarceration during the last several decades and their grounding in the war on drugs as the contemporary incarnation of a racial caste system, following both slavery and Jim Crow, but “redesigned” for an era in which the language of race-based justifications is no longer permitted. The revived prominence of law-and-order politics began, not coincidentally, with Richard Nixon's successful post–Civil Rights era rhetoric and the Republican Party's “southern strategy,” and started a course, beginning in the mid-1970s, in which incarceration rates in the United States increased fivefold by the late 2000s to more than 750 per 100,000, a rate higher than in any country in the world.Footnote ¹ And “it is the [gendered] racial dimension of mass incarceration” that is “its most striking feature.”Footnote ² For instance, among African American men born at the height of the Civil Rights era, nearly a third of those with a high school education or less—and 60% of high school dropouts—have experienced incarceration, with a larger proportion under the control of community corrections.Footnote ³ This pervasiveness of criminal justice “in the lives of young black men” is, as sociologist Bruce Western explains, “a historically novel development in American race relations.”Footnote ⁴

Not only are these trends tied to the growth of punitive crime-control legislation and funding priorities that disproportionately target urban minorities—including the War on Drugs, gang enhancement statutes, and juvenile waivers to adult court—but their consequences also extend well beyond the prison. In addition to felon disenfranchisement as a means of political exclusion, “a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of which are powerfully reinforced by social stigma,” result in the legal denial of access to “employment, housing, and public benefits” for the formerly incarcerated.Footnote ⁵ These have deep implications not only for the reproduction of thick injustice but also for the types of participatory politics, such as “public reason,” called for by the contributors to this volume.

Thus, no account of thick injustices in urban America can be complete without rigorously contending with “the strong and mutually reinforcing relationships between expansions in racial inequality and the sharp growth in African-American incarceration rates that took place after 1970.”Footnote ⁶ Yet numerous authors in Justice and the American Metropolis routinely treat contemporary urban injustices as an “intractable legacy” (Ford, p. 223; my emphasis) of past exclusionary practices, with contemporary effects that “are often unintended” (Hayward and Swanstrom, p. 19; my emphasis) and persist “even in the face of widespread goodwill” (Ford, p. 235). Despite numerous keen insights available in this volume, a basic premise—that many facets of thick injustice stem from the institutionalized consequences of historical racism—ultimately suggests a more benign set of social and political processes than that suggested by systematic research on contemporary crime control. This is not simply about the “powerful personal incentives to practice a politics of exclusion” among “even those … with egalitarian political and moral impulses” (Macedo, p. 43). Instead, the success and “popularity of mass political appeals … link[ing] racial threat to street crime”Footnote ⁷ signal that contemporary injustices are much more malign. History is not history.

Political Institutions, Place, and Space

Recognizing crime control as a central feature of metropolitan injustice also complicates the focus on local institutions. The impact of fragmentation at the local level is certainly important; for instance, police practices in the metropolis often function as mechanisms of surveillance and exclusion, identifying the poor, particularly racial minorities, as “out of place” in primarily white and middle-class suburban spaces. In addition, there is compelling evidence that experiences of policing are heavily influenced by race and space, with people of color in disadvantaged urban communities being the disproportionate recipients of simultaneous over- and underpolicing, as well as various forms of police misconduct.Footnote ⁸

Yet as Weir notes in her contribution to this volume, “because federal policy plays such a key role in setting the rules of the game for local decisions, it is essential to understand how federal rules magnify the disadvantages of the poor” (p. 252). Nowhere is this more evident than with regard to crime-control policy. For example, in The Perils of Federalism (Reference Miller2008), political scientist Lisa Miller carefully documents how public participation at the municipal level—where crime is often understood as embedded within a range of social inequalities—is “mobilized out” of the political process at the state and federal levels. Instead, “highly active single-issue groups and crime control bureaucracies are mobilized into the political process,”Footnote ⁹ resulting in the routine replication of severely truncated and punitive frameworks to guide crime policy.

These institutional processes, at the state and federal level, are critical for reproducing the thick injustices of the metropolis. In fact, as demographer Becky Pettit (Reference Pettit2012) details, even our knowledge of the extent and nature of metropolitan injustice is deeply skewed, due especially to the ways in which federal statistical agencies exclude the incarcerated in the collection of data about educational, economic, and other social conditions. The “invisibility” of incarcerated populations—who are disproportionately urban, poor, and minority—consequently functions to conceal the extent of thick injustice and inequality in the US metropolis.

Moreover, while the contributors to this volume elaborate on the ways in which business interests have come to heavily guide urban policy—articulated most explicitly in Susan Fainstein's identification of the current privatized period of urban redevelopment planning—this is also the case with regard to mass incarceration, but also with distinct features that limit the utility of a primarily local analysis. The pervasiveness of private capital's involvement in mass incarceration has led some to recognize it as “the prison-industrial complex.”Footnote ¹⁰ Private contractors have drawn large profits from the construction and management of prisons, in addition to benefiting from prison labor in the production of goods and the control of prison services. Sociologist Megan Comfort describes billions of dollars paid by state governments to a variety of private companies for correctional functions.Footnote ¹¹ Telecommunications companies, for instance, “levy hefty surcharges on prisoner-initiated calls, and … bill them at rates [at least] three times … the cost of a regular phone call,”Footnote ¹² with large commissions returned to state departments of corrections.

Again, the local effects of such practices—including additional economic strains on the families of the incarcerated—are driven by state-level decision making. Such practices and expenditures have consequences at the level of the metropolis, with “destructive effects” on the funding available to support state and local expenditures for other services.Footnote ¹³ The broader spatial implications of these practices are also noteworthy: Prisons are most often built in economically depressed, primarily white rural communities, providing jobs, health-care benefits, and pensions otherwise unavailable in these communities, as noted by Frug (pp. 206–7) in this volume. Thus, it is not just spatial relations within the metropolis that are implicated in the distribution of advantage and disadvantage associated with mass incarceration but also between cities and rural communities within states. Centering crime control in our understanding of metropolitan injustices, then, requires rigorous investigation of their broader interplay with state and federal politics, policies, and priorities.

The Gendering of Thick Injustice

Finally, the gendered quality and consequences of thick injustices receive scant coverage in Justice and the American Metropolis. This is in keeping with larger trends in social science research, with limited attention to gender differences in the experience of urban disadvantage, including the role and impact of gender inequality. Yet the harms of thick injustice are not gender neutral, and thus any efforts to ameliorate them should necessarily involve an understanding of the overlay of gender with race, class, and place. One of the most commonly recognized forms of male privilege—an economic dividend in the formal economy—is not widely available in disadvantaged communities (though it is often replicated in the informal economy).Footnote ¹⁴ Sociologist William Julius Wilson (Reference Wilson2009), for example, notes that black women have superior educational outcomes than black men, including lower dropout rates and higher college completion rates. Moreover, he suggests that African American women's greater concentration in service, rather than manufacturing, industries offers them greater protections from the most harmful impacts of economic restructuring.

In fact, the situation is more complex, with significant gendered harms for women as well: Research on the intersecting impacts of race, gender, and class in the labor market, for instance, suggests that many jobs in the service economy do not provide strong protections from economic conditions. Moreover, across race and ethnicity, the gender gap in wages remains. In addition, poor urban women are disproportionately responsible for the economic well-being of their families, a circumstance exacerbated by the growth in single-mother households in poor communities and decreases in “marriageable” men in these settings,Footnote ¹⁵ due, in part, to mass incarceration. Moreover, the increased punitiveness of the welfare state results in even fewer protections for poor women, especially mothers, heightening the feminization of poverty in the metropolis and beyond.Footnote ¹⁶

Two additional areas of research have pointed to the disproportionate gendered harms of urban racial inequality for minority men: trends in mass incarceration, as described herein, and disproportionate risks for violent victimization, including homicide. There are distinct gendered harms for women as well. With regard to mass incarceration, for example, scholars have begun to attend to the “secondary prisonization” experiences of women with incarcerated loved ones, and the variety of impacts—economic and otherwise—on the families of the incarcerated.Footnote ¹⁷ As important but less researched are the consequences of prison culture on gender relations between women and men in the community. There is no question that risks associated with gun violence and homicide exact disproportionate harm on young minority men. But there is also growing evidence that women's risks for violence—especially sexual and intimate partner violence—are disproportionately high in disadvantaged urban communities.Footnote ¹⁸

Fainstein's and Weir's contributions make note of the challenges and limitations of such programs as the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) and HOPE VI as mechanisms for addressing spatial inequality and residential segregation. Unmentioned, however, is that the MTO evaluation revealed that moves to neighborhoods with improved socioeconomic conditions and lower crime were directly beneficial to young women: Neighborhood safety, particularly the decline in sexual harassment and coercion, are primary factors the evaluators point to for explanation.Footnote ¹⁹ Each of these examples illustrates that we cannot adequately examine, explain, or remedy the thick injustices of the metropolis without serious consideration of their gendered dimensions.