Money is power in the United States, and mass incarceration plays a major role in determining who can wield power and who can’t. As we’ve noted repeatedly over the years, it is no coincidence that the poorest and most vulnerable communities are also the most policed. The criminal legal system erects significant barriers to employment and the ballot box, economically and politically weakening entire communities. Importantly, this arrangement impacts all workers: employers use this massive class of disadvantaged people to threaten all workers with replacement and increasingly risky unemployment if they dare to demand better wages and conditions. It is clear that mass incarceration perpetuates poverty and economic injustice.

Mass incarceration also weaves a narrative that pits people with similar economic interests against one another, reducing systemic inequality to matters of individual choice. Fortunately, understanding mass incarceration as the wealthy’s preferred economic policy clarifies that ending it is necessary for all movements for justice and equality — all working people benefit from solidarity with criminalized people because of how mass incarceration perpetuates poverty and economic injustice.

In this briefing, we compile ten examples of how mass incarceration blocks progress toward economic justice. We argue that our massive system of criminalization is not an isolated issue, nor is it someone else’s problem; it is an engine of inequality that traps people in poverty, weakens worker power, and undermines political organizing toward a more prosperous future for the vast majority of people.

Mass Incarceration Traps Low-Income Communities in Poverty

First, it’s important to understand exactly how mass incarceration perpetuates poverty, creating a vicious cycle. Criminalizing the poorest people, saddling them with debt, and destroying their financial futures has grave consequences for their families and wider communities. Additionally, prisons are economically depressing for the poor rural towns that host them, leaving them in financial ruin for years to come. It turns out that struggling urban and rural communities have a shared interest in ending our country’s reliance on prisons to address poverty and unemployment.

Read the full article about mass incarceration and poverty by Eric Seligman and Brian Nam-Sonenstein at Prison Policy Initiative.