{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018867924528301886, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.270935960591133, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Incarceration & social inequality

In the last few decades the institutional contours of American social inequality have been transformed by the rapid growth in the prison and jail population. 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 prisons and jails, 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. Still the scale and empirical details are largely an unknown story. In this paper we describe some new research outlining several of the latest trends in incarceration and their social and economic impact. Though the rate of incarceration is historically high, perhaps the most important social fact is the inequality in penal confinement, producing extraordinary rates of ∗We gratefully acknowledge Bryan Sykes, Deirdre Bloome, and Chris Muller helped conduct the research reported in this paper.