A review of a research paper written by Becky Petitt and Bryan Sykes on the legalized exclusion of institutionalized individuals in data collection efforts during the 1960s.

1. Civil Rights Legislation
and Legalized Exclusion:
Mass Incarceration and
the Masking of Inequality
A Review by Adewale Maye

2. Civil Rights Legislation of the 1960s
1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Ended segregation in public places and banned employment
discrimination based on religion, sex, color, sex, or national
origin
1965
The Voting Act of 1965
• Prohibits racial discrimination in voting
1965
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of
1965
• Funded primary and secondary education; emphasizing equal
access to education and aims to eliminate achievement gaps

3. The
Implementation
of Civil Rights
Legislation
• In order to allocate federal
resources to states and
localities for the monitoring and
evaluation of the new
legislation and the people it
protects, there was a large call
for data collection
• Each federal civil rights
legislation was accompanied
with federal efforts to collect
data using social survey data
like Current Population Survey

4. Current Population Survey and Its Limitations
Social survey data like the
Current Population Survey
was limited to survey
samples of individuals living
in households.
The exclusions of certain
groups not living in
households from the survey
data collected in the 1960s
undermines the
assessments of the legal
effectiveness of the civil
rights legislation.
Some of the exclusions
included the homeless and
unstably housed, but more
specifically inmates

5. A Brief History
of Mass
Incarceration
• Mass incarceration is defined as the significant increase in the
number of incarcerated people in the United States in the last
40 years or so.
• The four‐decades‐long expansion of the criminal justice
system has led to the acute and rapid disappearance of
young, low‐skill African‐American men from portraits of the
American social, economic, and political condition.

6. Research Thesis
Race and educational inequality in
incarceration hinders the
establishment of social facts,
conceals inequality, and undermines
the usefulness of key social science
data.
While mass incarceration reinforces
race and class inequalities in
America, the full impact of the
criminal justice system on American
inequality is obscured by the
continued use of data collection
strategies and estimation methods
that predate prison expansion.

7. Methodology
• The extent of elisions associated with mass incarceration is illustrated by
comparing trends in employment, education, and voter turnout limited to
the civilian population measured by the Current Population Survey and
including inmates using additional data provided by the Bureau of Justice
Statistics.
• The authors constructed time series that track employment, failure to
complete high school, and voter turnout for the noninstitutionalized
civilian population represented in the Current Population Survey.
• Additionally, they construct a series of adjustments to include inmates held
in federal, state, and local prisons and jails from 1972-2012

8. Conclusions:
Employment
• In 1972, 75% of low-skilled black men were
employed according to the Current
Population Survey, but the data that includes
inmates and former inmates indicate the
employment rates are at 26% in 2012, falling
nearly 50 percentage points.
• Increasing incarceration rates reduced labor
force participation dramatically in four
decades for African American men so much
that a black high school dropout is more
likely to land in jail than working in paid
labor force.

9. Conclusions:
Education
• Measures of the high school graduation rate
that exclude inmates consistently
underestimate high school dropout rates or
overestimate the educational attainment of
the U.S. population
• In 2012, conventional data sources that
exclude the incarcerated population
underestimate the dropout rate among
young white men by 24%. Among young
black men the dropout rate is
underestimated by 71%.

10. Conclusion: Voter
Turnout
• Data from 2008 and 2012 provide clear
evidence that the exclusion of prison and jail
inmates from voting statistics results in
severely inflated turnout rates for
sociodemographic groups with high
incarceration rates.
• The narrowing of the race gap in the voter
turnout rate is not as dramatic as
conventional data sources imply and young
black men do not vote as commonly as
young white men

11. Concerns, Takeaways, and Opinions
Does the civil rights legislation apply to institutionalized
individuals?
Is the exclusion of inmates and former inmates a misuse of
statistics and consequently tarnish current data on black progress?
Did the civil rights legislation work in the long run?

12. Thank you!
Any questions?

13. References
• Pettit, B. and Sykes, B. L. (2015), Civil Rights Legislation and Legalized Exclusion:
Mass Incarceration and the Masking of Inequality. Sociol Forum, 30: 589-611.
doi:10.1111/socf.12179
• TheAtlantic. “Mass Incarceration, Visualized.” YouTube, YouTube, 2
Oct. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=u51_pzax4M0.