 We have a particular point in time where we have, for example, increase in the war on drugs, right? And we have changes in terms of criminal justice, right, occurring. But as economists, we're also knowing that there's this whole other literature, right, out there that's also looking at inequality, increasing over this same time period. And while there's a lot of literature that tells us that there are economic consequences of incarcerations, we know that incarcerated people are going to have lesser job prospects. They're going to have less wealth accumulation. They're going to have higher probabilities of repeat incarceration and so forth. There's less literature that's thinking about inequality as a potential economic correlate to incarceration. My name is Anita Alves-Pina. I'm a professor of economics at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. I study labor markets and intersections with things like immigration, with inequality. In my recent work with my colleague, Luke Ptac, who's at Belmont University, we take a look at incarceration rates and how they've increased so substantially within the United States over time. So if you look back from 1970 to about 2010, you'll notice that incarceration rates really move from about 100 people per 100,000 to about 500 people per 100,000. And so this is a huge difference, right? This is a huge difference that we see over time. And if you go farther back in history and look at incarceration from 1880 up until the time period where we start looking at this in more detail in 1970, we never see those year-by-year incarceration rates going up above 150 persons per 100,000. So this mass incarceration is really a more recent phenomena in the United States where we see these really huge numbers. And so in our work, we're considering how that might interrelate with what's happening in terms of local labor market inequality. We look at, down to the local level, we look at commuting zones to think about kind of clusters of counties that come together that make up different commuting patterns. And we take a look at those in order to consider local markets a lower geographic scale and see how this might be relating to mass incarcerations. In terms of the aggregate trends, we know that inequality has been increasing over the same period. And so we kind of came to this from a step back where we're looking at those two trends together and then thinking about how this varies spatially and how it also varies across race and ethnicity in the United States as well. So stratification economics really comes into play where we think about privilege and we think about how there might be different group dynamics and group identity dynamics that differ for subpopulations. In our work, we're considering how kind of a classic economic story would say that incarceration should be related to things like crime rates. So if crime is increasing, of course we should be incarcerating more people. And so we have data on things like the crime rates themselves and we try to net out that story. And to the extent that we see that there's still this pattern and we do see that there's still this pattern, we also try to rule out some other empirical stories as well, but we see that there's different relationships for those who are in different racial and ethnic groups and they're clear differences. And so stratification economics is really an emerging field that's coming into play in terms of considering how those group identities may lead to completely different dynamics for different subpopulations. Part of the story is definitely crime, right? But if we take criminal activity and we control for it, we still see that there's this increase and substantial increase. And when we think of this in a historical context and how crime has changed, it's really a disproportionate phenomena that we're witnessing here with mass incarceration. And so we might say that that's part of the story, but it's certainly not all of the story and it's certainly not driving the most recent dynamics to the extent that you would expect if that was the only thing that was going on here. We took a look at both inequality statistics and then we took a look at relative poverty statistics. And so for inequality, we looked at the Gini coefficient and the Gini coefficient is a traditional statistical measure of inequality. As the Gini increases, we have more and more inequality. That's how we read the measure. And so what we found was if we were to increase the Gini by one point on that Gini scale, which ranges from zero to 100, if we're increasing by one point in a local labor market, we're seeing about 60 more incarcerated persons in that local community. And so that's a big number. It's a big number when you think of it in comparison to, for example, the mean, that's more than a 10% increase. And so it's quite substantial. In addition to looking at the Gini coefficient, we also took a look at these relative poverty measures where we wanted to delve into that stratification economic story into some more detail. And so for that one, we're thinking about areas of the country where we have high white poverty versus non-white poverty. And so we took a ratio of the two. We took a ratio of the white poverty rate to the non-white poverty rate. And as this poverty rate, this relative poverty rate then increases by 1%. We're finding that in terms of incarceration at the local level, we're having an increase of 73, 75 persons per 100,000. And that's huge as well, right? Especially when you compare it to what we were seeing when we were also looking at the other measure. When we think about stratification economics, we're thinking about both divisions in terms of things like race and ethnicity and demographics. We're also thinking about stratifying by other dynamics, economic dynamics, thinking about lower income versus higher income populations. And so I think we see parts of both of those stories in terms of what we're finding in this paper. We're finding that we certainly see that there's something disproportionate that's occurring when poverty is increasing amongst white populations at a different rate than what we're seeing amongst populations that are non-white. We see something that's very different that's happening in terms of those incarceration rates. So there have been some recent proposals in terms of thinking about how to deal with criminal law and how to deal with public policy. And so the first step act was perhaps a first entrance into some of the newer thinking about some changes that we might want to make. And so if we wanna think about incarcerated individuals and what types of public policies, there's probably several steps that we need to think about. And so our work is really indicating that there's an economic question, there's a question in terms of criminal law and the question is really not just two separate sides here. These are definitely things that we think that policy makers need to address together and think about how inequalities could be happening both in terms of how we deal with criminal punishment and inequalities may be happening in terms of how we're dealing with income and income policy and economics. So I'm trained as a neoclassical economist. I come from that tradition for sure, but one of the exciting parts of this project is that my co-author definitely comes from a different tradition, a heterodox tradition. And so we really come together here in terms of debating the different stories, right? Thinking about how there could be more than one story that's consistent with what we're observing in the data. And if we're true scientists and we're truly trying to figure out what is the truth, we need to be open to different perspectives. And so while we do have a traditional starting place, maybe we can start to think about how we can adapt that framework or start from a different position as well and compare our findings there as well. So I think that our research definitely has some aspects of both that are coming into it. And I think that's exciting.