Abstract
Becky Pettit’s Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress begins with what should be a relatively easy question for a social scientist to answer: what percentage of African American men born between 1975 and 1979 will likely serve time in prison by 2009? As it turns out, answering that question is less straightforward than it seems. To their chagrin, the initial data analysis that Pettit and her colleagues produced suggested that more African American men had been to prison than were alive. This implausible finding is the product of serious and persistent limitations in national data sets. Thus begins the puzzle that Pettit unravels throughout Invisible Men. To what extent do national data systems exclude the experiences of persons who are or have been incarcerated, and what implications does this have for our understanding of racial progress and social policy more generally?
Undercounting and the outright exclusion of entire segments of the American population is certainly nothing new when it comes to national survey data. The Constitution calls for the collection of data from American citizens in the form of a decennial census, but the “three-fifths compromise” meant that Black Americans were counted differently until at least 1850. Today, national data collection efforts have become increasingly more sophisticated and have expanded beyond the census to include more detailed economic, health, and education information as embodied in the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey, among a multitude of others. Although undercounts have improved considerably over time, Pettit reports that even the 2000 census failed to include as many as 3 percent of African Americans in population counts. Pettit explains that the contemporary undercount is most likely a function of higher rates of residential mobility, homelessness, and residency in “highly concentrated” urban areas among a particular segment of African American men. This problem is further exacerbated in federal surveys whose sample population is drawn exclusively from individuals living in households. These household-based surveys exclude one in nine African American men between the ages of twenty and thirty-four.
The core of Pettit’s argument, however, is not simply that federal surveys undercount African Americans; rather, it is that the phenomenon of mass incarceration gives rise to a historically specific form of social exclusion that has profound implications for social policy and the project of American democracy. As a concept, mass incarceration refers not only to the staggering increases over the last thirty years in the number of Americans living behind bars but also to a pronounced skew in the racial demographics of people being sent to prison and the length of time they spend there. So, for example, the number of adult Americans incarcerated in either state or federal prisons in 1980 was approximately 300,000 (a statistic that was considered, at the time, to be alarmingly high). Today, that number is upward of 1.6 million, and more than 60 percent are persons of color. African American men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men, a proportion that has grown considerably over the duration of the War on Drugs.
Given this, Pettit’s insight is particularly important: federal surveys that exclude prisoners have always been problematic, but the situation is worsened considerably in the present moment when we factor in the implications of mass incarceration. Over 1 in 100 adults is incarcerated in a federal, state, or local prison or jail. To the extent that former inmates are disproportionately likely to experience high rates of homelessness and high levels of residential mobility, the problem compounds. One of the most serious implications is that indicators of racial progress, based primarily on survey data that exclude inmates and former inmates, are largely erroneous. In the early 2000s, for example, commentators heralded the growing convergence of the white–black high school drop-out rate (much of which was attributable to greater levels of educational achievement among African Americans). If, however, we include prisoners in national estimates of the drop-out rate, we find a drop-out rate that is 40 percent higher among African American men than what is suggested by the Current Population Survey. Pettit reports similar problems in calculating racial progress in employment and wages, voter participation, and health outcomes. In many respects, Invisible Men serves as an excellent companion piece to Michelle Alexander’s (2010) best-selling book on the racial politics of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow. Alexander offered a paradigm-shifting frame for understanding how mass incarceration eroded decades of racial progress and shored up systems of racial inequality. Pettit’s book should be, for social scientists and policy makers at least, no less significant. Her meticulous and thorough review of the data convincingly demonstrates that the “fact” of racial progress depends on the systemic exclusion of a sizable portion of the African American community.