ABSTRACT
The process of deindustrialization, which began in earnest in the United States in the 1970s, has had a strong impact on working people in the United States. Well-paid industrial jobs for high school graduates and immigrants without language skills have all but disappeared, as industry migrated to the global South, non-industrial regions where workers were paid a small fraction of what the largely unionized American labor force had come to expect (Doussard et al., 2009; Hill and Negry, 1987; Wilson, 1996). A powerful indicator of the transformation of the American economy is easily available to anyone who cares to investigate the place of production of most of the goods available to us. Simply look at the place of manufacture on clothing tags and on other commodity goods. Beyond deindustrialization, and related to it, are the increasing incarceration rates of people of color in the United States According to the Criminal Justice Fact Sheet (NAACP, n.d.), from 1980 to 2008 the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled from about 500,000 to 2.3 million. The United States today has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners. There has been a 500% increase over the past 30 years in the number of people currently in the nation’s prisons or jails, making the United States “the world’s leader in incarceration” (The Sentencing Project, 2013a). Further:
More than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the “war on drugs,” in which twothirds of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.
