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In the past three decades, incarceration has become an increasingly powerful force for reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities. A new wave of sociological research details the contemporary experiment with mass incarceration in the United States and its attendant effects on social stratification. This review first describes the scope of imprisonment and the process of selection into prison. It then considers the implications of the prison boom for understanding inequalities in the labor market, educational attainment, health, families, and the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Social researchers have long understood selection into prison as a reflection of existing stratification processes. Today, research attention has shifted to the role of punishment in generating these inequalities.

This brief think piece considers the uses of "people first" language in the context of incarceration, both from a historical and contemporary perspective, and offers some thoughts about the use of this language by prison researchers. It focuses on the uses of such language in the context of disability studies and rights, and the focus on language by activists working to challenge systemic racism and abuse in prison systems in the 1960s and 1970s. It makes an argument for prison researchers to work intentionally with their use of language in keeping with broader disciplinary concerns around meaning making in prisons.

What is the best method for rehabilitating minors? -- Changing views in changing times / Alex Piquero and Laurence Steinberg -- Keeping kids close to home / Johnathan Silver -- A matter of maximizing treatment / Mayra Aguilera -- What does prison achieve? / Anna Aizer and Joseph Doyle -- Probation and other options / Barry Krisberg, Susan Marchionne, and Christopher Hartney -- The swedish solution / Erwin James -- Using a smarter approac / Andrew Day -- Should juveniles be incarcerated with adults? -- A tale of tragedy / Caitlin Curley -- The juvenile injustice system / Human Impact Partners -- Cruel and usual punishment / Andrea Wood -- The opposite effect / Shauneen Lambe -- An ideal alternative? / Shaena Fazel -- The brutal truth for imprisoned youth / Alberto Ayo and Howard Iken -- Does age matter? -- The life sentence ban and its impact / Gretchen Gavett and Sarah Childress -- Raise the age, reduce recidivism / Teresa Wiltz -- The trend against minor prosecutions / Lorelei Laird -- And what about victim rights? / National Organization of Victims of Juvenile Murderers -- When kids are responsible for their own actions / Alan Greenblatt -- Facts about the incarceration of minors -- Organizations to contact -- For further reading -- Index -- Picture credits.

Since the mid-1970s the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased roughly fivefold. As Christopher Wildeman and Bruce Western explain, the effects of this sea change in the imprisonment rate—commonly called mass imprisonment or the prison boom—have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little schooling. Imprisonment diminishes the earnings of adult men, compromises their health, reduces familial resources, and contributes to family breakup. It also adds to the deficits of poor children, thus ensuring that the effects of imprisonment on inequality are transferred intergenerationally. Perversely, incarceration has its most corrosive effects on families whose fathers were involved in neither domestic violence nor violent crime before being imprisoned. Because having a parent go to prison is now so common for poor, minority children and so negatively affects them, the authors argue that mass imprisonment may increase future racial and class inequality—and may even lead to more crime in the long term, thereby undoing any benefits of the prison boom. U.S. crime policy has thus, in the name of public safety, produced more vulnerable families and reduced the life chances of their children. Wildeman and Western advocate several policy reforms, such as limiting prison time for drug offenders and for parolees who violate the technical conditions of their parole, reconsidering sentence enhancements for repeat offenders, and expanding supports for prisoners and ex-prisoners. But Wildeman and Western argue that criminal justice reform alone will not solve the problems of school failure, joblessness, untreated addiction, and mental illness that pave the way to prison. In fact, focusing solely on criminal justice reforms would repeat the mistakes the nation made during the prison boom: trying to solve deep social problems with criminal justice policies. Addressing those broad problems, they say, requires a greater social commitment to education, public health, and the employment opportunities of low-skilled men and women. The primary sources of order and stability—public safety in its wide sense—are the informal social controls of family and work. Thus, broad social policies hold the promise not only of improving the well-being of fragile families, but also, by strengthening families and providing jobs, of contributing to public safety.

The California prison system, the largest in the country and the most at risk legally, operated at almost 200 percent of rated holding capacity, with more than 160,000 inmates. A special three-judge federal court had found that these conditions, in which suicides, violence, and lack of health care and other social services were endemic, violate the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause and ordered the state to reduce its prison census by as many as 46,000 inmates, to only 137.5 percent of capacity. In May 2011, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision (Brown v. Plata), affirmed the lower court, upholding what dissenting justices called perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our Nation's history, one based on a judicial travesty. Operating under intense legal, political, and budgetary pressures, policymakers must search desperately for other ways to reduce prison overcrowding until the necessary but politically elusive structural and policy changes can be made. Under these difficult conditions, any policy that promises to reduce overcrowding without undue risk to public safety deserves serious consideration. In what follows, I propose such a policy. Simply stated, the federal government should deport some immigrant criminals before they enter prison, not after. This would seem to be a no-brainer. Adapted from the source document.