What role does the criminal justice system play in economic inequality? How does economic inequality cause mass incarceration? And how do we tease those two questions apart? Robynn Cox, an expert in the economics of mass incarceration, talks about her research uncovering the links between economic inequality and the criminal justice system.
Robynn Cox is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California School of Social Work. She is an economist and inequality researcher, and her work focuses on understanding the social and economic consequences of mass incarceration.
Twitter: @RobynnCox
Overcoming social exclusion: Addressing race and criminal justice policy in the United States https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Cox.pdf
The Impact of Mass Incarceration on the Lives of African American Women
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1007/s12114-011-9114-2
Identifying the Link Between Food Security and Incarceration
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/soej.12080
Further reading:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.22277
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2019.1709883
http://www.jameinpcunningham.com/uploads/1/1/2/0/112070441/black_lives_ccow.pdf
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
As a matter of policy, we decided to chuck people in jail for just about anything.
Robin Cox:
We’ve tried to incarcerate our way out of this and it’s just really expensive to do that. The public is paying the cost, the individuals who are having contact with this system, they’re also paying.
Nick Hanauer:
Is inequality creating mass incarceration, this mass incarceration, creating an equality, a little of both. How does this-
David Goldstein:
A lot of both.
Nick Hanauer:
A lot of both.
Speaker 4:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer. The best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures. So Nick, one thing we’ve talked about on this podcast in the past is how when we look at economics, we don’t always look at all of the costs or all of the benefits. We’ll focus on one or the other. And I think a great example of that in the United States is our huge prison industrial complex.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. It’s interesting because as a matter of policy, we decided it was better to chuck people in jail for just about anything as a way of fighting crime. But in the end it may have created more crime because it creates more poverty and criminalizes more things. And the repercussions and the costs of mass incarceration are almost certainly massively outweighing the benefits of prosecuting people and throwing them in jail today. Obviously you need to balance the economic costs, the pure dollar costs of incarcerating people with the benefits of the legitimate role of the criminal justice system and discouraging bad behavior. But we definitely seem to have gotten our approach out of whack.
And today on the show, we get to talk to an expert in that, Dr. Robin Cox, about the economics of mass incarceration. She’s an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California School of Social Work and an Economist in inequality researcher. So it’ll be really interesting to try to tease it apart. Ultimately it’s interesting trying to understand the cause and effect here. Is inequality creating mass incarceration? Is mass incarceration creating inequality, a little of both? How does this all-
David Goldstein:
A lot of both.
Nick Hanauer:
A lot of both. Yeah. A lot of both.
David Goldstein:
A lot of both. But we’ll ask Dr. Cox to explain that to us.
Robin Cox:
My name is Robin Cox. I’m an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. And my research is centered on the intersection of the criminal legal system in inequality. I’m interested in understanding the barriers faced by marginalized communities with an emphasis on those that’s personally faced by black communities. And that also means that the approach I take is from a life course approach. So it’s more holistic in the sense that, I look at CLS contact as a continuum from initial contact to reintegration in order to understand how these policies, the institutional policies and systemic barriers that might be created by the system impact individuals and communities.
Nick Hanauer:
So Robin, you’ve obviously done a lot of research into the consequences of mass incarceration, but what interests me in particular is this weird feedback loop, obviously between mass incarceration and inequality. So on the one hand, mass in creates more inequality and on the other hand, massive amounts of inequality creates incarceration to a certain extent. How do we disentangle these two forces?
Robin Cox:
Typically, what you see with the research is you will see research that focuses on understanding criminal behavior, understanding what might deter criminal behavior, understanding… In my case, I’m interested in what leads some groups to disproportionate contact. But then there’s also another aspect of research that looks at the effect of the criminal legal system on the individuals and their families and communities. And then once someone has that contact, what effect does that contact have when they’re transitioning back into society? And then it, of course, circles back around to that has implications for if individuals and people aren’t able to successfully transition that could have implications for further criminal behavior recidivism and for families as well.
So I think to answer your question, we as researchers try and disentangle these effects separately, I suppose because there is this feedback loop to the system where you have inequality leads to more incarceration and then incarceration further leading to more inequality. So I can give an example of that from my own research where my colleagues and I, Jamie Cunningham, and Alberto Ortega and Kenneth Wally have a fairly new paper that we’ve been working on, looking at the effects of residential segregation on homicides. And we find a robust relationship between residential segregation, which we know have been caused by discriminatory policy. So we find a robust link between residential segregation and non-white homicides, for example. But then on the other end, I might conduct some research on what is the effect of the timing of incarceration for example. I have a paper on the timing of incarceration and how it impacts housing and security. And in particular, I look at homelessness.
So whether or not one is incarcerated as a youth or a transitional age youth, which is a young adult or at age 25 and older, does that impact the duration of homelessness and the age that one experiences their first homelessness. So we also do find an association between that timing of incarceration and the age at first homelessness, where someone who is incarcerated at earlier ages experiences homelessness earlier. I guess just chipping away at understanding the effects of this system, if that makes sense.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. So actually, why don’t we level set quickly if we can, and I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but can you give us some stats on how many people are currently incarcerated the United States and who those people are, gender, race, et cetera, maybe relate those numbers to other countries?
Robin Cox:
Yeah. So as you may know, the United States has the largest incarceration rate in the world. It has the largest incarcerated population, I think China, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. So just to give an idea in terms of the criminal legal system, the bureau of justice statistics in their survey of state criminal history information systems found over 100th criminal records. So that’s contact with… It’s not necessarily convictions but those are the number of criminal records that they found in the United States. And of course that number’s not accounted for duplicates, but as you imagine, even once accounting for that’s a huge number. So 110 million criminal records. And I just wanted to qualify that, to say that doesn’t account for duplicates in the system. And that doesn’t mean that those records led to a conviction or an incarceration, but that gives you an idea of the contact that we you have in this country with the criminal legal system.
There are some estimates in terms of conviction. One estimate is by 2010. So that’s just right after the height of incarceration. For example, there were 19 million individuals with the felony conviction. Of course, these numbers disproportionately impact minorities and in particular blacks. There’s been some estimates that approximately 50% of black men are arrested by age 23. And again, in 2010, there were an estimated 33% of blacks that had felony convictions. There are about 6.3 million individuals who are supervised under our corrections. So that would mean community supervision. So probation and parole, and then those incarcerated in jails and prisons. There’s over 2 million people who are incarcerated in jails or prisons specifically. Most of those individuals who are incarcerated are men, the vast majority, about 93%. And then those who experience the highest rate of incarceration reflect those who have experienced historical marginalization oppression. So blacks have the highest rate followed by American, Indians and Alaska natives, which many might not know. Hispanics and then whites and then finally Asians have the lowest rate.
David Goldstein:
So to put this all in perspective, this is in the country of approximately 335 million arrests contacts with the criminal justice system. That statistic that one in three black men have been imprisoned. Not just have contact with police have been imprisoned and that 50% of black men have been arrested by age 23. And that gets back to your comment about how the younger you are when you have contact with the system, the worse your life outcomes, the higher the rate of homelessness. And I’m sure a lot of other things, and that’s very consistent with the empirical research on other bad outcomes from stress environments when you’re younger. So it helps explain a lot.
Robin Cox:
Yeah. That’s one in three have had a felony conviction and then other estimates have estimated that of black men born in 2001, one and three are estimated to be incarcerated as well. So yeah, for incarceration and conviction, that number is about one and three.
David Goldstein:
And it’s not simply a matter of do the crime and do the time. These felony convictions stick with you. It makes it harder to get employment. It makes it harder to get a loan or to rent an apartment. Yeah. If you could speak to that about how just having a felony conviction can influence outcomes throughout your life.
Robin Cox:
Yeah. So having a felony conviction worsens employment and earnings, and of course that effect is worse for racial and ethnic minorities as well. It lowers the accumulation of assets. You get less access to credit markets as a result, lower levels of wealth and has an impact on disparities. And also the felony conviction and then a subsequent incarceration can really be disruptive to social networks, which we know are also really important for obtaining and maintaining meaningful employment. This affect also, of course, the loved ones who are supporting those individuals who have been incarcerated or have had these felony convictions. So I have thought about contact with the criminal legal system as an economic shock to the household. And the reason for that is that families often lose income when they have a loved one incarcerated and they incur debt. And the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has estimated that these families incur on average almost $14,000 in debt paying for court related costs and fines.
Nick Hanauer:
You wrote a re report on the impacts of incarceration on black women specifically. So tell us about those findings.
Robin Cox:
I have a paper in the review of black political economy that looked at… Just wanted to understand the plight of women who are incarcerated and black women. Black women are disproportionately incarcerated just as black men are. And what I found in writing that paper is that women often are more disadvantaged than the men. They often have lower skills. They suffer from more health conditions than the men do. They’ve often entered crime because they’ve ran away at very early ages from abusive environments. Often their crime is connected to trying to take care of others and, or supporting a problem with substance use.
And the other thing that is important to know is that they don’t quite have access to the same level of rehabilitative services that the men do while they’re incarcerated, because there’s so few women who are incarcerated relative to men that prisons can’t necessarily obtain economies of scale. So that means that women often don’t have the access to some of the programs that men do for education skill development. And they can be worse off once they’ve been released from prison and they could have greater labor market penalties as well. So even though they’re smaller in number, it’s also really important to understand and focus on them as well, especially if we want to address inequality.
Nick Hanauer:
So let’s talk a little bit more. Is there a way to care characterize, again, all this stuff is so hard to pull apart, but the broad economic impact of this high level of incarceration, not just on the individuals, but on the economy overall. Because if people are not engaged successfully with the economy, the economy overall shrinks. So is there a way to characterize that?
Robin Cox:
In terms of lost wages, 370 billion was an annual loss estimate of the earnings from a conviction or incarceration. So that was an annual loss estimate that was done by my colleague, Terry Ann Craigie and her co-authors.
David Goldstein:
And that’s just lost earnings, not other costs.
Robin Cox:
Yeah. That’s not other costs. And that’s why I mentioned those other costs as well. The other costs are huge if you were to bring in the health costs. And the intergenerational costs that, of course you have to discount that, but the effects on children. But there was also one thing I wanted to mention that I felt to mention as well. And that’s the effect of incarceration, which is another place that I do research is the effect of in aging and successful aging. And that’s another cost because the incarcerated population is aging. Individuals are being incarcerated at later ages. They’re being released at later ages.
So if you have this cycle of contact with the system, if you of inconsistent job history, or employment history, then you may not have adequately been able to pay into social security, which means that we might see increases in racial disparities and aging outcomes as well. And I particular, I have been looking at cognitive impairment and have found that formerly incarcerated individuals have higher rates of cognitive impairment. So all of these things factor into the cost and they’re something to consider. And especially as it relates to aging, minority populations heavily rely on social security. So this is yet something else we have to consider when we think about this beast that we created. But there’s other costs to society of the incarcerations that we’re learning as well, such as the health cost to incarceration. Both the individual and their family members suffer health consequences from contact with the criminal legal system and from being incarcerated. This contact can lead to higher chronic illnesses or greater chronic illnesses that are related to stress. So that’s an additional cost as well. And then of course, there’s intergenerational effects. So there’s effects with children at which these numbers don’t take into consideration as well.
David Goldstein:
And there’s a direct cost to taxpayers just in maintaining the criminal justice system as well. The figures I’ve seen are like 300 to 400 billion a year?
Robin Cox:
So there’s a direct cost of maintaining that contact with the criminal justice system. I’ve seen lower figures, although that figure was for a few years ago, but the figure I’ve seen is around 180 billion for the expense of the crime legal system. And that includes the fact that we have to house these individuals, provide meals for these individuals, employ the staff that services these individuals. But then there’s also, we have costs as it relates to policing, costs as it to courts as well. So there’s a myriad of cost as it relates to the system, which is why some have called it the prison industrial complex.
Nick Hanauer:
Robin, what should we do about all this?
Robin Cox:
That’s a really good question. We need to focus on the root causes. So while there’s undoubtedly a behavioral aspect to crime, we’ve really focused on that individual aspect of crime and have ignored addressing the root causes of crime, which is tantamount to just putting a bandaid on the issue. So we really need to focus on those policies that have led to social exclusion and of historically marginalized individuals, and also that have led others to be marginalized. So these policies, we can’t fix them by throwing more police at the issue. We’ve tried to incarcerate our way out of this, and it’s just really expensive to do that. The public is paying the cost. The individuals who are having contact with the system, I hope it’s clear that they’re also paying the cost. A very heavy burden, and it’s actually leading to entrenched racial disparities in inequality.
So I think to the way to fix this is to make those investments that Dr. King and others had argued for many years ago to try and address those root causes, which are really inequality and opportunity. So it’s really important that we look to investing in public goods in these areas, which include education. There’s other ways to fight crime. We can fight it through social programming, like education, early childhood education, for example. So we need to focus on those policies that are really helping to address the root causes, more equitable public goods, because disinvestment in public goods that happened along with the residential segregation that we’ve seen over the years is the factor. Making education more equitable is a factor. Addressing discrimination of labor market, these are all factors. And then of course the our word could be a policy as well, or reparations, because we’re really trying to address these root causes that have led to these inequities and these disparities.
Nick Hanauer:
I suspect that the biggest problem here is not the criminal justice system. It’s the economic system.
Robin Cox:
Yeah. I think one of the main things to understand is that as a society, we’ve made the choice to deal with the failure of that system to place that on the burden of the criminal legal system. And that’s how we got to where we are today is through policies, really, if you just get to the nuts and bolts of the issue. So I think as a society, we have to go and then reflect and think about what type of society do we want and really be aware of the policies that we implement and how they might impact other groups, especially marginalized groups. So that might mean also doing an audit of our policies to see if they disproportionately impact in a negative way other groups, and including that in our cost benefit analysis so that we understand, and we know which policies. On the surface, they might look good. On the surface, they might look race neutral and when they’re being implemented and affects the unintended consequences of these policies may not be race neutral.
David Goldstein:
Right. And let’s speak clear, there’s no question about it. They’re clearly not race neutral in their outcomes. There’s no way to argue otherwise when you have a system that incarcerates black men at five times, the rate of white men, a lot of that comes from, you’re over policing. You’re going to have more contact with police if you are a black man.
Robin Cox:
Yeah. And look, we have a paper that was recently published in the journal for policy analysis and managing that investigated the Edward Byrne State and Local Memorial Grant Program, which is considered to be the major funder of the war on drugs. And we investigated the discretionary portion of that grant program within a causal framework to understand what was the effect of this program on arrests. And then we also looked at racial disparities and arrests, and we found that racial disparities increased as a result of this program.
David Goldstein:
And with real world outcomes for people in those communities, you had. As I understand it, you had not just higher incarceration rates but lower grad graduation rates, higher levels of unemployment.
Robin Cox:
Well, no, this specific paper only looked at… We focused on arrests and other outcomes as it related to policing and the Edward Byrne Program. So we didn’t look at incarceration in this paper, but we found that it increased drug sales arrests, racial disparities, and drug sales arrests. And then it also increased drug sales arrests for both blacks and whites as well. So it speaks to the expansion of the net of the criminal justice system, but then also how even with that expansion, it’s still disproportionate impacted blacks. That particular policy.
Nick Hanauer:
We always ask the benevolent dictator question, which is, if you were in charge politics being within your control, what would you do?
David Goldstein:
No obstacle. No, US senate to block you.
Nick Hanauer:
What would you do?
Robin Cox:
Wow. That’s a question. I would probably start with reparations just because there was a debt there that is compounding over time in these negative ways that needs to be paid. So I probably start there and then look at some of these other factors, look at addressing discrimination in the labor market, look at access to education more equitable. I would probably start there. I know that’s politically and terms of feasibility that becomes a little bit more challenging, but I think I would start there.
David Goldstein:
But we learned from the pandemic relief that direct cash transfers help.
Robin Cox:
Help, yeah. There’s tons of really smart people doing research on that. You probably are aware of William Dardy, [inaudible 00:26:52] in court. They’re doing research on that issue as well on reparation specifically. And more people are interested in it as a policy which I think is great because I think that Dr. King talked about this right before his death, that you needed the economic investments. That’s what he was lobbying for, was those economic investments. In the community, he talked about equality under the law is cheap. It doesn’t really cost anything. And what we really need are those economic investments to ensure real equality. And we still haven’t gotten that to this day. So I think I would start there.
David Goldstein:
Our final question is always, why do you do this work?
Robin Cox:
Thanks for asking. I do this work because I hope that my work will have help improve the lives of others, especially those who are marginalized and disenfranchised. I also do this work because I wanted to understand and shed light on the role that the criminal legal system plays in inequalities. And oftentimes we write people off who have been caught up in that system. And without really understanding the way the system is working and whether or not there’s any systemic or institutional barriers that have pushed individuals more towards one way or another.
And I also think that failure to address racial biases in our society, we risk democracy for all Americans. Not just for black Americans or other communities of color. It risks the democracy for all Americans. And when we don’t address the systematic racial bias in our policies in general, and of course I’m interested in the criminal legal system, it leads to the perpetuation of those racial inequalities and over representation of groups that have been marginalized within those sectors that represents social exclusion. And that’s how I think about the criminal legal system. So again, just when mass incarceration was driven by public policy. So mass incarceration ties right along in that and understanding the policies and that society that has demanded and why, because failure to understand these, we won’t adequately address inequality, if we don’t do that.
David Goldstein:
And it’s a policy choice and we can make different choices.
Robin Cox:
Exactly.
David Goldstein:
So we really appreciate you doing the work on this.
Nick Hanauer:
Really, that so much-
Robin Cox:
Yeah. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
David Goldstein:
A lot of the principles, which we’ve talked about over the past couple years on this podcast, I think apply to our criminal justice system. Regardless of whether you’re looking at it as an economic issue or a social justice issue, whether it’s an economic justice issue or a social justice issue. In the end, we always say this about the economy, the purpose of the economy is to broadly improve the lives of people.
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
David Goldstein:
The massive people. And that should be the purpose of the criminal justice system as well. The reason why we created three strikes in your route and mandatory sentencing and the war on drugs and the war on crime and all these things was to broadly improve the lives of people. Maybe not the who people who were incarcerated, but broadly, and it’s failed at that. And this gets to another one of our rules of thumb. And that is a solution should solve more problems than it creates. And we need to look at the criminal justice system in the same way. We look at our economic policies and ask the same question. Does it create more problems than it solves or does it solve more problems than it creates? And the fact that it may or may not, but let’s just say that it does reduce crime because you’re locking more people up. Are you actually solving more problem or are you-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Is a society net better off?
David Goldstein:
Right. Or are we just satisfying our urge for-
Nick Hanauer:
Vengeance and punishment and so on and so forth. Yeah. And certainly there’s a degree to which we have criminalized behavior that is never going to go away like the war on drugs being the canonical example of that. And rich white kids don’t get in trouble for drug crimes and poor black kids do. And that’s just crazy nonsense.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. If you wonder why our economy is so racially divided, this is not the only reason. But it’s certainly part of it.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s a certainly a big factor.
David Goldstein:
And if our goal here, Nick, of course, is what drives us is trying to close that inequality gap, that income and wealth inequality gap across the board for everybody. Not just for white people. So it certainly has-
Nick Hanauer:
Probably not going to do it without reforming this system too.
David Goldstein:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 4:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on medium @civicskunkworks and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram, @pitchforkeconomics. As always from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.