Americans have heard the phrase “the rich get richer” so often that it has turned into a cliché. A Prison Policy Initiative report has outlined statistics on the truth of the cliché, connecting it with mass incarceration as a cause that revealed the adage’s reality.

The report “10 ways that mass incarceration is an engine of economic injustice” by Eric Seligman and Brian Nam-Sonenstein paralleled the fight for a fair economy with the movement against prisons. The argument made two major points. First, mass incarceration made poor communities even poorer because it undermined movements for economic justice. Second, mass incarceration made unionizing harder and weakened workers.

“In 1973, the wealthiest 10% of Americans captured one-third of all income, but nearly 40 years later, they had captured one-half of it. In that time, the ultra-rich 1% went from holding 9% of all income to nearly a quarter of it,” said the report.

The report reasoned that mass incarceration used sentencing to drive the poor into deeper poverty. “Poverty traps people in jail,” said the report. “About 83% of people in local jails are legally innocent and awaiting trial, and many of them are too poor to make bail.” Jail also prevented employment and increased the chances of job loss, leading to long-term job instability and lost benefits.

Mass incarceration has impoverished families by saddling them with “astronomical new expenses related to supporting a loved one on the inside.” An Ella Baker Center survey showed that 58% of families living in poverty could not afford the costs associated with a conviction, said the report.

Mass incarceration has deepened poverty in rural prison towns, PPI revealed, holding new prison construction responsible for poverty. New prisons had not created new jobs because seniority rules favored existing workers. PPI asserted that new prisons discouraged local investment. Business might fear an incoming criminalized population, and new prisons have often attracted large chain stores with which smaller local business could not compete.

“After California’s state prison in Corcoran was built in 1988, fewer than 10% of the jobs went to local residents,” said the report. It cited a 2007 study of California’s prison boom by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which reported that on average, fewer than 20% of jobs from new state prisons went to local residents.

The report’s second major point addressed employment justice. “Among the more than 50,000 people released from federal prisons in 2010, a staggering 33% found no employment over four years post-release and no more than 40% were employed at any given time,” said the report.

PPI said they saw unions as an “equalizing force, reducing racial and gender economic disparity and increasing political participation,” but “mass incarceration undermines these benefits by preventing workers from leveraging their collective power through unions” and political engagement.

Disenfranchisement laws that prevented returning citizens in many states from voting affected “5.17 million people — 1 out of every 44 adults.”

PPI also criticized the Census Bureau for skewing political representation through “prison gerrymandering.” The practice has disempowered communities by removing potential voters but then counting them as living in the jurisdictions of their imprisonment. Mass incarceration also “artificially lowers official unemployment rates as incarcerated people go uncounted,” stated the report.

The report blamed mass incarceration for continuing a tradition of reinforcing divisions that obscured shared interest in policy reforms. “Throughout U.S. history, racism has prevented the development of a fully united movement for workers rights,” the report stated.

A PPI example of mass incarceration’s influence on societal ideas related to labor market research that found employers more frequently assuming “criminality in Black job applicants, whether they have a criminal record or not.”

The report concluded that the vast majority Americans “have a stake in dismantling this engine of inequality.” PPI advocated the idea that “solidarity between all workers — criminalized or not — is necessary to progress toward a more economically just future.”