Race, Class, and Gender of Prisoners

U.S. Society and the Penal Population

In 1997, Erik Olin Wright estimated that 50% to 60% of the U.S. population were working class, since they were employees who neither owned nor controlled capital. Members of the owner class made up about 15% of the population, while capitalists employing 10 or more people represent 1% to 2% of U.S. citizens. The remaining percentages Wright divided among various professional-managerial class fractions.

Of the 281,421,906 persons the U.S. Census Bureau counted in 2000, 75.1% were white, 12.5% were Hispanic or Latino, and 12.3% were black or African American. American Indian and Alaska Native represented about 1%, Asians 3.6%, and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders represented around 0.1%. In April 2000, women comprised just over half of the U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).

In contrast, most prisoners are either jobless or working poor. Although African Americans comprise just over 12% of the U.S. population, nearly half of those incarcerated in prisons are black. Finally, women make up on average only about 7% of the nation's confined, meaning that about 93% of the prison population are men.

Class

Sociologists typically divide capitalist society into four classes: (1) The capitalist class owns productive capital, seeks profit in the market, and buys labor power. Such people may run factories or some other kind of industry. (2) The professional-managerial class is the most privileged of the employee classes. These individuals, such as CEOs of corporations, do not own significant capital, but they control labor power. In contrast, (3) the working class owns no significant capital and sells its labor power for wages. Workers, like factory employees on an assembly line, only marginally control labor power. Finally, [Page 802](4) the industrial reserve is comprised of workers who cannot sell their labor. This group of people is also sometimes referred to as an “underclass.”

The dynamic of capitalism, or capital accumulation, underpins the historical development of the United States. Striving to maximize profit and gain competitive advantage, capitalists use strategies of wage suppression, mechanization and automation, and scientific management to reduce production costs. Increasing output per worker throws more people into the industrial reserve or forces them into low-wage labor markets. The business cycle exacerbates labor market volatility.

Social scientists have long noted the connections between systems of punishment and economic structure. In Capital, written during the 1860s, Karl Marx (1867) describes the plight of the industrial reserve. He theorizes that class structure and economic processes are major determinants of crime and punishment. Studies by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer (1939), Richard Quinney (1980), and Jeffrey Reiman (2004) support Marx's thesis. Punishment under capitalism, these scholars propose, reflects the needs and interests of dominant social classes. Private control of property gives elites the structural capacity to shape the direction of the law and state activities. If popular forces and rapid social change threaten class privilege and system legitimacy, the coercive arm of the state expands and intensifies its activities. Likewise, empirical studies find that the strains of impoverishment and marginalization increase the likelihood that members of the working class will resort to street crime and suffer coercive controls.

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