Criminal Justice system disproportionately affects minorities – barriers prevent wealth growth upon release

[Jhumpa, “Exploring Guaranteed Income Through A Racial And Gender Justice Lens,” Roosevelt Institute, June 2019 https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/RI_UBI-Racial-Gender-Justice-brief-201906.pdf, accessed June 26, 2023, GDS-LL]

How Wealth Is Extracted through the Criminal Justice System

While there are many drivers of wealth extraction from communities of color, mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty are often overlooked and understudied as wealth-stripping mechanisms.

In the 1990s, politicians pushed a number of “tough on crime” policy measures into law, leading to unprecedented investments in new prison infrastructure and the expansion of the private prison business sector. What followed was a dramatically sharp increase in prison populations—despite the fact that crime rates were declining—in an effort to self- justify the massive build out of prisons along with a distinct and profit-driven effort to fill prison slots (Equal Justice Initiative n.d.). The US prison population expanded from 220,000 persons in 1972 to 2.2 million persons in 2014 (Equal Justice Initiative n.d.). Over- policing in communities of color lead to higher, disproportionate arrest rates for Black, Latinx, and Native American communities, and pervasive racism within our criminal justice system result in higher incarceration rates for Black and brown people (Hartney and Vuong 2009). As a result, Black and brown communities have been, and continue to be, the most negatively impacted by the push for mass incarceration in the US (Alexander 2010). As noted in a recent Pew Research brief, “In 2016, Black [American]s represented 12 percent of the US adult population but 33 percent of the sentenced prison population.

White [American]s accounted for 64 percent of adults but 30 percent of prisoners. And while Hispanic [American]s represented 16 percent of the adult population, they accounted for 23 percent of inmates” (Gramlick 2018). Native Americans are 1.5 times more likely than white Americans to be arrested, and they are incarcerated at 2 times the rates of their white counterparts (Hartney and Vuong 2009).

Incarceration radically undermines a person’s capacity to build wealth. This is due to the loss of income and job growth opportunities during time spent in prison. Additionally, there is difficulty in finding steady, high-quality employment upon release due to state and local legal barriers, employer bias towards people with criminal records and convictions, and continued systemic burdens such as continued supervision placed on the formerly incarcerated.