Though the rate of incarceration is historically high, perhaps the most important social fact is the inequality in penal confinement. Yet the scale and empirical details tell a story that is largely unknown. This is a profound institutionalized inequality that has renewed race and class disadvantage. Social and economic disadvantage, crystallizing in penal confinement, is sustained over the life course and transmitted from one generation to the next. As an outcast group, the men and women in our penal institutions have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream. 1 America’s prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. In the last few decades, the institutional contours of American social inequality have been transformed by the rapid growth in the prison and jail population.
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