Wildeman Christopher, Western Bruce
Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course at Yale University, USA.
Future Child. 2010 Fall;20(2):157-77. doi: 10.1353/foc.2010.0006.
Since the mid-1970s the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased roughly fivefold. As Christopher Wildeman and Bruce Western explain, the effects of this sea change in the imprisonment rate--commonly called mass imprisonment or the prison boom--have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little schooling. Imprisonment diminishes the earnings of adult men, compromises their health, reduces familial resources, and contributes to family breakup. It also adds to the deficits of poor children, thus ensuring that the effects of imprisonment on inequality are transferred intergenerationally. Perversely, incarceration has its most corrosive effects on families whose fathers were involved in neither domestic violence nor violent crime before being imprisoned. Because having a parent go to prison is now so common for poor, minority children and so negatively affects them, the authors argue that mass imprisonment may increase future racial and class inequality--and may even lead to more crime in the long-term, thereby undoing any benefits of the prison boom. U.S. crime policy has thus, in the name of public safety, produced more vulnerable families and reduced the life chances of their children. Wildeman and Western advocate several policy reforms, such as limiting prison time for drug offenders and for parolees who violate the technical conditions of their parole, reconsidering sentence enhancements for repeat offenders, and expanding supports for prisoners and ex-prisoners. But Wildeman and Western argue that criminal justice reform alone will not solve the problems of school failure, joblessness, untreated addiction, and mental illness that pave the way to prison. In fact, focusing solely on criminal justice reforms would repeat the mistakes the nation made during the prison boom: trying to solve deep social problems with criminal justice policies. Addressing those broad problems, they say, requires a greater social commitment to education, public health, and the employment opportunities of low-skilled men and women. The primary sources of order and stability--public safety in its wide sense--are the informal social controls of family and work. Thus, broad social policies hold the promise not only of improving the wellbeing of fragile families, but also, by strengthening families and providing jobs, of contributing to public safety.
自20世纪70年代中期以来，美国的监禁率增长了大约五倍。正如克里斯托弗·怀尔德曼和布鲁斯·韦斯特所解释的那样，监禁率这一巨变——通常被称为大规模监禁或监狱热潮——的影响集中在那些最有可能组建脆弱家庭的人群中：即受教育程度低的贫困少数族裔男性。监禁会减少成年男性的收入，损害他们的健康，减少家庭资源，并导致家庭破裂。它还会增加贫困儿童的不利条件，从而确保监禁对不平等的影响在代际间传递。反常的是，监禁对那些父亲在入狱前既未涉及家庭暴力也未涉及暴力犯罪的家庭具有最具腐蚀性的影响。由于贫困少数族裔儿童现在父母入狱的情况如此普遍，且这对他们产生了如此负面的影响，作者认为大规模监禁可能会加剧未来的种族和阶级不平等——甚至可能从长期来看导致更多犯罪，从而抵消监狱热潮带来的任何益处。因此，美国的犯罪政策以公共安全之名，制造了更多脆弱家庭，并减少了其子女的生活机会。怀尔德曼和韦斯特倡导多项政策改革，比如限制对毒品罪犯以及违反假释技术条件的假释人员的监禁时间，重新考虑对惯犯的刑期延长，并扩大对囚犯和刑满释放人员的支持。但怀尔德曼和韦斯特认为，仅靠刑事司法改革无法解决导致入狱的学业失败、失业、成瘾未治疗以及精神疾病等问题。事实上，仅专注于刑事司法改革会重蹈美国在监狱热潮期间所犯的错误：试图用刑事司法政策解决深层次的社会问题。他们说，解决这些广泛的问题需要社会在教育、公共卫生以及低技能男女的就业机会方面做出更大的承诺。秩序和稳定的主要来源——广义上的公共安全——是家庭和工作的非正式社会控制。因此，广泛的社会政策不仅有望改善脆弱家庭的福祉，而且通过加强家庭和提供就业机会，为公共安全做出贡献。
