Among minorities, being incarcerated can not only take up one’s time, but it could also take years off someone’s life — even if the jail time is for a minor crime.
Evelyn Patterson, a Vanderbilt University sociology professor, gave a talk based on her dissertation titled “Incarceration’s Assault on Life Expectancies” to about 25 people in the University of Maryland’s Morrill Hall on Monday afternoon.
“In my research and findings, every minority who is incarcerated loses two years off of their life expectancy for each year served in prison,” Patterson said.
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Patterson spoke about three types of death that occur during or after incarceration: the loss of physical, social and civil life. Those who are incarcerated experience social death because they tend to lose social ties with people, she said.
“When these people are in prison, they have to abide by very strict rules and are treated as if they were not human beings,” she said. “When they get to the outside world, they have to start asking the question: ‘Who can I trust?’”
Family members, friends and communities can have negative social effects when a person enters prison or re-enters society after being released, she said.
“Imagine a father who just got out of prison — would he be able to continue his role of father?” Patterson said. “Families of the incarcerated have to start coming up with other alternatives when raising their child because they don’t want the child to be affected by the event of having a parent missing from their lives.”
Patterson also addressed civil death. An inmate’s fate — especially a minority’s — is left to the judicial system and the jury’s decision on kind of sentence to give. Citizens who have been convicted of a felony without having their civil rights legally restored are ineligible to serve on a jury.
“If you come from a poverty-stricken neighborhood and you commit a crime, the jury that will be deciding your fate will most likely not be from your part of town,” Patterson said. “The way the courts select a jury is very simple yet specific.”
This talk was part of a seminar series from the Maryland Population Research Center, said Sangeetha Madhavan, associate director of the center.
“This topic was a part of the MPRC’s academic and population research that the University of Maryland does every year,” Madhavan said. “This is a popular topic, so we decided to have someone come in and speak about it to have a better understanding of incarcerations and the decreasing of life expectancies.”
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Brittany Dernberger, a sociology doctoral student, said she was intrigued with the civil death portion of the talk because it is something that she is familiar with.
“I study these kinds of situations in my research, so to hear other perspectives that I wasn’t that aware of helped me understand more about incarcerations and minorities and how it can affect their privileges while living back in society outside of the prison,” Dernberger said.
Patricia Garcia, communications coordinator of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity, said she was happy this university was hosting events like this one so students and the surrounding community can become more aware of discrimination in incarceration.
“It can impact people in many different ways. You may be someone who has family or friends who have to deal with this situation, so it is important to bring light to all the social inequalities that are happening in our society today in order to find ways to improve them in the future,” Garcia said.
