“The Imprisonment Boom of the Late 20th Century: Past, Present and Future.” The Oxford Handbook on Prisons and Imprisonment (original) (raw)
Related papers
Racially disproportionate prison populations in the United States
Crime Law and Social Change, 1989
This paper reviews trends in black-white incarcerations in the North and South from 1870 to 1980. Using census data on imprisonments it finds that the degree of disproportionate imprisonment of blacks (relative to their representation in the general population) has been higher in Northern states than in Southern states from the middle of the 19th century through the present, although recently the trends have begun to converge. After reviewing explanations for the higher imprisonment rates of blacks in the North, it reviews black-white patterns of arrests and imprisonments by state for 1960, 1970 and 1980 and finds that the variations in black-white imprisonments are not fully accounted for by arrests. Finally, it comments on appropriate methodologies for examining racial differences in treatment in the criminal justice system.
Forthcoming in Criminology (May Issue). This manuscript combines insights from historical research and quantitative analyses that have attempted to explain changes in incarceration rates in the United States. We use state-level decennial data from 1970-2010 (n=250) to test whether recent theoretical models derived from historical research that emphasize the importance of specific historical periods in shaping the relative importance of certain social and political factors explain imprisonment. Also drawing on historical work, we examine how these key determinants differed in Sunbelt states, those stretching across the nation’s South from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, from the rest of the nation. Our findings suggest that the relative contributions of violent crime, minority composition, political ideology, and partisanship to imprisonment vary over time. We also extend our analysis beyond mass incarceration’s rise and analyze how factors associated with prison expansion can explain its stabilization and contraction in the early twenty-first century. Our findings suggest that most of the factors that best explained state incarceration rates in the prison boom era lose power once imprisonment stabilized and declined. We find considerable support for the importance of historical contingencies in shaping state-level imprisonment trends, and our findings highlight the enduring importance of race in explaining incarceration.
2016
The proportion of U.S. prison inmates who were black increased dramatically between 1940 and 2000. While about two-thirds of the increase occurred between 1940 and 1970, most recent research analyzes the period after 1970, focusing on explanations such as the war on drugs, law-and-order politics, discrimination, inequality, and racial threat. We analyze the growth in the racial difference in incarceration between 1940 and 1980, focusing on the role of demographic processes, particularly population growth, migration, and urbanization. We implement three analyses to assess the role of these demographic processes: (1) a simple accounting model that decomposes the national trend into population growth, changes in arrests, and changes in sentencing; (2) a model of state variation in incarceration that decomposes the racial difference in incarceration into population change, migration between states with different incarceration rates, and other processes; and (3) race-specific models of within-state variation in incarceration rates using state characteristics coupled with a decomposition of the role of changes in state characteristics.
Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment.
This essay maintains that the United States has developed a new, decidedly punitive law and order regime that at its core features racialized mass in-carceration. We will show that over the past thirty years the United States has gone on an incarceration binge, a binge that has fallen with radically disproportionate severity on the African American community. The rise of the racialized mass incarceration society is attributable to the simultaneous processes of urban socioeconomic restructuring that produced intensifi ed ghetto poverty and severe social disadvantage and dislocations through the 1980s to the present, on the one hand, and a series of social policy actions (and nonac-tions) that made jail or prison among the primary responses to urban social distress, on the other hand. During this time, social policy took this deeply punitive turn in substantial measure as a result of the effects of anti-black racism in American culture and public opinion. One result of these circumstances is a serious problem of legitimacy for the criminal justice system in the eyes of many Americans, especially but not exclusively African Americans.
Victims & Offenders, 2010
The disproportionate number of people incarcerated is one exceptional feature of criminal justice in the United States. Comparisons among the United States and other Western democracies on several social, political, and economic factors fail to provide a justification for the high incarceration rates in the United States. The more than 2.3 million people incarcerated in this nation largely reflect policy choices that have been made at all levels of government in the United States. While these policy choices have created unprecedented imprisonment rates, abnormally large incarceration rates are not entirely unknown in other nations. In the 1950s, Finland had an incarceration rate more than three times greater than that of its Nordic neighbors. More than 50 years later, Finland was able to reduce its use of incarceration to a rate comparable to its neighbors. Germany is another country that has worked to reduce its reliance on incarceration. A focus on how other Western democracies have reduced their incarceration rates can provide the United States with blueprints for how effective crime control can be achieved without a heavy reliance on incarceration.
Debating Mass Incarceration in the USA
2015
The U.S. imprisonment trend also looks like a hockey stick. Stable and modest growth occurred throughout the early twentieth century. Then in the 1970s, the line shot up, quintupling by the 2000s. Aside from dampening economic optimism, this trend evokes a similar visceral reaction to McCloskey’s. The change in U.S. inmate population has been so big and its accumulation so fast that it can’t be ignored.