I wonder when incarceration replaced military service as the fundamental shared experience of the American working class
fairly skeptical about either of these really being a fundamental shared experience, but if they were, the numbers crossed over in the mid-late ‘90s from eyeballing these graphs (military, incarceration), which sounds reasonable
still just a single digit percentage of the population in either case
apparently 11% of Americans served in WWII, and that was concentrated in particular demographics (young men from rural areas), making it a fairly common shared experience, although now that I think about it incarceration has the advantage that even if there are only two million people in prison at any given time it’s an experience that people are going to pass in and out of.
the internet suggests that 5% of Americans will spend time in prison, or 9% of men, or 25-33% (!) of black men.
