n the last few decades, the institutional contours of American social inequality have been transformed by the rapid growth in the prison and jail population.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. As an outcast group, the men and women in our penal institutions have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream. Social and economic disadvantage, crystallizing in penal confinement, is sustained over the life course and transmitted from one generation to the next. This is a profound institutionalized inequality that has renewed race and class disadvantage. Yet the scale and empirical details tell a story that is largely unknown.
Though the rate of incarceration is historically high, perhaps the most important social fact is the inequality in penal confinement. This inequality produces extraordinary rates of incarceration among young African American men with no more than a high school education. For these young men, born since the mid-1970s, serving time in prison has become a normal life event.
The social inequality produced by mass incarceration is sizable. Disparities of race, class, gender, and age have produced. Prisons are the deep end of the criminal justice system.
Imperialism changed all this, as Europeans disrupted these traditional ways and imposed their beliefs and social structures on colonized Africans. Europe and Africa had centuries of interaction before colonialism. Most of these connections occurred, however, at coastal outposts in Africa.
