Michael Cook | October 18, 2016 | Intellectual Takeout
If there is a Year Zero for Male Infantilization it is 1965, the year President Johnson launched the American welfare state by rolling out the “Great Society”. Eberstadt also identifies it as the year when the Great Incarceration began. A crime wave started which was handled by jailing more and more criminals. Nowadays the US has the highest incarceration rates in the world. Even after release many of these men enter the legions of prime-age men who are not looking for work. “The circumstances of this ex-prisoner and at-large felon population are, it seems, a matter of almost complete indifference to the rest of us,” says Eberstadt. “These people only show up in our national statistics if and when they again run afoul of the criminal justice system.”