Pager Tackles Immigration and Crime Control Links in France

Fall 2002, Volume 24, Number 1

Devah Pager

Having wrapped up a major study of the consequences of U.S. crime policy for rising inequality, sociologist Devah Pager left for Paris this fall to examine another nation beset with problems of social inequality exacerbated by law enforcement practices.

A newly appointed IPR faculty fellow, Pager was set to join Northwestern’s sociology department when she was awarded a Fulbright to conduct research in France. She is spending the year investigating how the French criminal justice system, at a time of economic instability, is responding to an influx of immigrants from developing countries, primarily Algeria and Morocco.

In recent years, France has intensified its crime control measures in response to a perceived increase in social disorder in immigrant neighborhoods. As a result, “France’s foreign and immigrant residents, while representing only about 6% of the population overall, comprise nearly 30% of the French prison population,” Pager says.

By conducting a systematic analysis of the social correlates of crime policy in France, she hopes to untangle the complex relationships among immigrant status, national origin, and economic standing as they relate to trends in law enforcement and criminal justice.

Pager considers immigration and ethnic conflict “one of the most important issues European nations such as Germany, the Netherlands, and France will have to face in the coming decades.” With very low birthrates and a consequent shortage of workers, these countries will need large-scale immigration, which must blend with “a fierce sense of national culture.” The problem is how to accommodate these large waves of immigration, she says.

Pager is particularly concerned with institutions such as education, labor markets, and the criminal justice system that affect racial inequality both in the United States and abroad. Her recent research has demonstrated that the criminal justice system has emerged as a major mechanism of stratification in contemporary American society. Given the vast numbers of individuals now processed through the criminal justice system, Pager believes “we are in danger of producing a ‘criminal underclass,’ whose social, economic, and political opportunities are severely constrained.”

Pager received her PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin in August. Her dissertation research provided evidence that a criminal record severely limits employment opportunities for both races, but even more so for African Americans.

Currently, there are 12-million ex-felons in the United States, nearly 8% of the working age population. Over half a million inmates are released from prison each year. Roughly two-thirds will be charged with new crimes and more than 40% will return to prison within three years, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The numbers are particularly staggering for young black men, who have a 28% likelihood of incarceration during their lifetime and a 50% likelihood if they drop out of high school.

To test her hypothesis that a criminal record differentially affects the outcomes of black and white job applicants, Pager developed an experimental “audit” design to compare the experiences of equally qualified black and white men in the context of real job searches. She found that a criminal record is associated with a 50% reduction in employment opportunities for whites and a 64% reduction for blacks.
“In our frenzy of locking people up, our ‘crime control’ policies may in fact exacerbate the very conditions that lead to crime in the first place,” she concluded. Noting that the inability to find good steady employment is one of the strongest predictors of recidivism, her work suggests that those who’ve served time are left with few viable alternatives.

In a co-authored paper with Eric Grodsky (American Sociological Review 2001), Pager found significant variation in the magnitude of black-white earnings inequality across occupations in the private sector, even after controlling for a variety of individual attributes. Occupations with large racial disparities tended to be client-based professions that rely on social networks for success. They concluded that segregated social networks, combined with the racial disparity in assets, are an important source of earnings inequality for blacks and whites in the same occupation.

Pager also co-authored a study with Lincoln Quillian (American Journal of Sociology, 2001) that found the percentage of young black men in a neighborhood is positively associated with perceived crime among neighborhood residents, even after controlling for the neighborhood’s official crime and victimization rates.

Pager’s international interests were stimulated by a fellowship in 1995 that took her to South Africa a year after Nelson Mandela’s election effectively marked the end of apartheid. While studying educational reform in a black township outside of Capetown, she got a front-row view of the dismantling of the structures of apartheid.

When Pager returns to Northwestern in the summer of 2003, she is contemplating several projects for future study. Among them are replicating her dissertation audit design in other cities such as Chicago, New York, and Oakland, and extending her earnings inequality work to learn how these trends differ by gender and over time. She also is considering a more in-depth investigation into client-based occupations, such as the legal profession, which had one of the largest racial earnings gaps in her study.

Pager’s latest working paper, “The mark of a criminal record,” is posted on the IPR Web site at www.northwestern.edu/ipr.