10 The Carceral State and the Politics of Punishment

Marie Gottschalk

Throughout American history, politicians American political development that argua- and public officials have exploited public bly rivals in significance the expansion and anxieties about crime and disorder for politi- contraction of the welfare state in the post- cal gain. Over the past four decades or so, war period. The carceral state now exercises these political strategies and public anxieties vast new controls over millions of people, have come together in the perfect storm. resulting in a remarkable change in the distri- They have radically transformed US penal bution of authority in favor of law enforce- policies, spurring an unprecedented prison ment and corrections at the local, state and boom. Since the early 1970s, the US prisoner federal levels. This explosion in the size of population has increased by more than six- the prison population and the retributive turn fold (Manza and Uggen, 2006). Today the in US penal policy are well documented. But USA is the world’s warden, incarcerating a the underlying political causes and wider higher proportion of its people than any other political consequences of this massive expan- country. A staggering 7.2 million people – or sion have not been well understood. 1 in every 31 adults – are either incarcerated, This is beginning to change. Since the on parole or probation, or under some other late 1990s, the phenomenon of mass impris- form of state supervision (Glaze et al., 2010). onment has been a growing source of schol- These figures understate the enormous and arly interest. Today the carceral state is a disproportionate impact that this bold and subject of increasing public interest. Indeed, unprecedented social experiment has had on Wired magazine included emptying the certain groups in the USA. If current trends country’s prisons on its 2009 ‘Smart List’ of continue, one in three black males and one in ‘12 Shocking Ideas that Could Change the six Hispanic males born in 2001 are expected World’, and Parade magazine featured Sen. to spend some time in prison during their Jim Webb’s (D-Va.) call to end mass incar- lives (Bonczar, 2003). ceration on its front page (Webb, 2009). The emergence and consolidation of the In their attempts to identify the political US carceral state is a major milestone in factors that help explain why the USA has

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 220505 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM 206 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

the world’s highest incarceration rate and 1998; Zimring et al., 2001; Domanick, 2004; locks up more people than any other country, Jacobson, 2005; Barker, 2009). scholars initially focused on political devel- Some of the most promising new scholar- opments at the national level since the 1960s. ship on the states has focused on the South More recently they have underscored the and the Southwest. This work is upending the significance of political and institutional conventional narrative of the rise of the US factors that pre-date the 1960s. Some of the penal system, with its emphasis on the north- most promising new research, which is dis- east, notably New York and Pennsylvania. cussed in more detail below, closely exam- In the standard account, the foreboding ines penal developments at the state and local penitentiaries of the 19th century, meant to levels. restore wayward citizens to virtue through The construction of such an expansive penitent solitude, evolved by fits and starts and unforgiving carceral state in the USA is into the modern correctional bureaucracies a national phenomenon that has left no state of the 20th century that, at least for a time, untouched. All 50 states have seen their viewed rehabilitating prisoners as a central incarceration rates explode since the 1970s. part of their mission (Perkinson, 2010: 7). But the state-level variation in incarceration Lynch (2010), Schoenfeld (2009), Perkinson rates is still enormous, far greater than what (2010), Campbell (2011) and others suggest exists across the countries of Western Europe. that the history of punishment in the USA is Incarceration rates (including both the jail more a Southern story than has been gener- and prison populations) range from a high ally recognized. Notably, in much of the of over 1100 per 100,000 people in Louisiana South and Southwest, the commitment to the to a low of about 300 per 100,000 in Maine ‘rehabilitative ideal’ appears to have been (Pew Center on the States, 2009: 33). This fragile and fleeting (Lynch, 2010). great variation and the fact that crime control The Great Recession has raised expecta- in the USA is primarily a local and state tions that the USA will begin to empty its function, not a federal one, suggest that local, jails and prisons because it can no longer state and perhaps regional factors might help afford to be the world’s warden.1 The new explain US penal policies. state-level studies are a sober reminder that Trying to unravel why the carceral state has gaping budget deficits will not necessarily been more extensive, abusive and degrading reverse the prison boom because a penal in some states than others is a blossoming area system is not only deeply embedded in a of research. The prison population edged state’s budget but also in its political, cul- downward in 24 states in 2009, but continued tural, institutional and social fabric. These to grow in 26 others. That year the total state more fine-grained state-level case studies prison population declined for the first time in suggest that some states may be better able nearly four decades but the federal prison than others to reduce their prison populations population increased by 3.4 percent (Pew in the future. Center on the States, 2010). Scholars have The wider political consequences of the shown that differences in socioeconomic vari- carceral state are another new and expand- ables, demographic factors and/or crime rates ing area of scholarly and public interest. help explain some of the state-by-state varia- Evidence suggests that having such a large tion in incarceration and criminal justice poli- penal system embedded in a democratic cies (Hawkins and Hardy, 1989; Jacobs and polity has enormous repercussions that rever- Helms, 1996; Beckett and Western, 2001; berate throughout the political system and Greenberg and West, 2001). Trying to account beyond. The carceral state has grown so huge for the remaining variation, scholars have in the USA that it has begun to metastasize zeroed in on differences in the institutional and warp fundamental democratic institu- and political context at the state level (Davey, tions, everything from free and fair elections

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 220606 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 207

to an accurate and representative census. THE DEEPER ORIGINS OF THE Furthermore, the emergence of the carceral CARCERAL STATE state has helped to legitimize a new mode of ‘governing through crime’ that has spread Until recently, scholars of the carceral state well beyond the criminal justice system to generally adopted a truncated timeframe as other key institutions, including the executive they sought to identify what changed in the branch, schools and the workplace (Simon, USA beginning in the 1960s to disrupt its 2007). generally stable and unexceptional incarcera- Mass imprisonment within a democratic tion rate and to bring back capital punishment polity and the hyper-incarceration (Wacquant, with a vengeance. The main political expla- 2008) of certain groups are unprecedented nations included: an escalating crime rate and developments. The consolidation of this new related shifts in public opinion (Wilson, model in the USA raises the question: Is this 1975: xvi; Dilulio, 1997; Ruth and Reitz, country exceptionally vulnerable to get-tough 2003); the war on drugs (Caplow and Simon, polices, or will other countries follow the 1999: 92–3; Gordon, 1994; Tonry, 1995; USA down the same punitive path? Two dec- Provine, 2007); the emergence of the profit- ades ago there was next to no comparative able prison-industrial complex (Abramsky, literature on crime control and penal policy 2007: ch. 6; Burton-Rose et al., 1998; (Tonry, 2007). Since then scholars have Dyer, 2000; Sarabi and Bender, 2000; begun to identify certain distinctive cultural, Hallinan, 2001); structural changes in historical, constitutional, institutional and American culture and society with the coming political factors that may render some coun- of late modernity (Garland, 2001); politi- tries more susceptible to get-tough policies. cians playing the ‘race card’ by invoking The growing recognition that the enor- the law-and-order issue for electoral gain mous carceral state is a pressing economic, (Edsall and Edsall, 1991; Beckett, 1997; political and social problem has spurred Davey, 1998; Zimring et al., 2001; Flamm, interest in the politics of reversing the prison 2005; Western, 2006: 58–62, 67–73); and the boom. Understanding what brought about collapse of the urban labor market for major decarcerations in the past is a new unskilled men due to deindustrialization and frontier in research. So is understanding the globalization (Parenti, 1999; Western, 2006). constellation of interest groups and social These contemporary factors are critical to movements that might successfully push to understanding the origins of the carceral reverse the prison boom. state. But accounts that stress recent develop- This essay first surveys work on the deeper ments seem to suggest that this major expan- political, institutional, and historical origins sion of the state and radical shift in public of the carceral state. It then turns to the new policy have shallow roots. Yet contempo- state-level scholarship on mass incarceration. rary penal policy actually has deep historical After that, it examines some of the wider and institutional roots. Both state capacity to political consequences of the carceral state, incarcerate and the legitimacy of the federal including its impact on elections and political government to handle more criminal matters participation, the emergence of new concep- were built up slowly but surely well before tions of citizenship, the criminalization of the incarceration boom that began in the immigration policy, the relationship between 1970s. the carceral state and the welfare state and A number of historically embedded insti- the phenomenon of ‘governing through tutional developments laid the foundation crime’. It concludes with a brief survey of for the construction of the carceral state new work on political resistance to mass (Gottschalk, 2006). These include, to list incarceration and a discussion of the some of the most important ones, the histo- comparative politics of penal policy. rical underdevelopment of the US welfare

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 220707 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM 208 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

state; the early establishment of an extensive of the penitentiary were deeply entangled network of rights-based and other public with disputes over slavery and abolition in interest groups stretching back to the 1920s the antebellum years (Hindus, 1980; Ayers, that helped lodge capital punishment in the 1984; Hirsch, 1992). After the Civil War, courts, not the legislature; the exceptional the convict-lease system was pivotal in the nature of the origins and development of the politics of Populism, Progressivism, race public prosecutor in the USA; and the coun- relations and the economic development try’s long history of morally charged cru- of the South (Carleton, 1971; Fierce, 1994; sades that helped build up the law enforcement Walker, 1988; Lichtenstein, 1996; Mancini, apparatus by fits and starts. 1996; Oshinsky, 1996; Myers, 1998; Shapiro, In addition to these early institutional 1998; Curtin, 2000; Blackmon, 2008; developments, a variety of other factors with Perkinson, 2010). Penal labor was a leading deep historical roots need to be understood issue for organized labor and a central feature in order to trace the origins of the carceral in electoral politics in the mid-to-late 19th state (Tonry, 2011). For example, the much- century and early 20th century (McLennan, heralded ‘liberal’ features of American polit- 2008). During the 1930s, Franklin D. ical culture may have contributed to making Roosevelt and his attorney general Homer the US penal system harsher, more degrad- Cummings shrewdly and quite successfully ing, and less forgiving (Whitman, 2003). exploited sensational crimes, most notably In the absence or rejection of an aristocratic the Lindbergh kidnapping, to advance their political culture and society, prisons in the broader agenda of extending federal jurisdic- USA historically have been rooted in extend- tion into crime control (Cummings and ing a brute egalitarianism that subjects all McFarland, 1937: 482; Alix, 1978: 90–1; pri soners, regardless of their social or politi- O’Reilly, 1982: 640–5; Simon, 2007: 47–9). cal status, to ‘low status,’ dehumanizing treat- The construction of the carceral state also ment, Whitman suggests. By contrast, waves complicates our understanding of the role of of penal reform in Germany and France race in American political development. The often entailed ‘leveling up’, or extending the creation of the carceral state was not merely penal and legal privileges enjoyed by politi- the latest chapter in a book that began with cal prisoners and incarcerated aristocrats to slavery and moved on to convict leasing, Jim other offenders. Crow, and the ghetto to control African- The conventional characterization of the Americans and other ‘dangerous classes’. last four decades as the country’s first real While there are similarities between these ‘law-and-order’ era, when issues of crime social control institutions, it is important and punishment were nationalized and politi- not to flatten out their differences and the cized for the first time in US history, is incor- differences in the political, institutional, rect. Law and order was a recurrent and and economic context that created and major theme in American politics long before sustained them. Treating these institutions as the 1960s and long before the modern one and the same minimizes the unprece- Republican Party strategically wielded this dented nature of the incarceration boom in issue to achieve national political domi- the USA since the 1970s. For all the horrors nation. The USA had an early identity as of the convict-lease system, relatively few a convict nation (Christianson, 1998: 13). blacks were subjected to it in the decades Penal concerns informed broader debates following the Civil War, though many about republicanism, utilitarianism, and law more feared it. Today’s incarceration rate and order during the founding decades of approximately 5000 per 100,000 African- (Dumm, 1987; Masur, 1989; Rothman, 1990; American males dwarfs by far the number Hirsch, 1992; Meranze, 1996; Pestritto, of blacks imprisoned in the South under 2000). Disagreements over the establishment convict leasing (Gottschalk, 2006: 269, n. 42;

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 220808 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 209

West and Sabol, 2009: 18). An African- and even segregationist Lester Maddox of American man with a felony conviction Georgia, did not immediately march in lock today scarcely has ‘more rights, and arguably step toward the prison and the execution less respect, than a black man living in chamber after Goldwater denounced the Alabama at the height of Jim Crow’, accord- ‘growing menace’ to personal safety in his ing to Michelle Alexander. ‘Once you’re electrifying speech before the Republican labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimina- convention in 1964 (Gottschalk, 2006: 10, tion – employment discrimination, housing 213–24, 234). Nor did these public officials discrimination, denial of food stamps and single-handedly impose the carceral state. other public benefits, and exclusion from jury It now appears that the construction of service – are suddenly legal’, she explains the carceral state was a deeply bipartisan (2010: 2). project from early on. Conservative congres- The country’s racial divide both thwarted sional Democrats began strategically wield- and facilitated the establishment of the ing the street crime issue in the 1950s, carceral state. For much of US history, racial, well before crime rates began to escalate ethnic and regional divisions periodically and leading Republicans took up the charge acted as a check on the development of (Murakawa, 2005: 81–2). Southern conserva- criminal justice institutions, especially at tives initially cast their opposition to major the federal level, even as they fueled popular civil rights legislation in criminological passions to criminalize certain behaviors terms, arguing that ‘integration breeds crime’ and certain groups. The moral crusades over (Murakawa, 2005: 82). As riots broke out in issues like ‘white slavery’, Prohibition and major cities across the country in the mid- juvenile delinquency that regularly convulsed to-late 1960s, they reformulated the connec- the country were a backhanded way of build- tion between civil rights and crime, ing up the criminal justice apparatus by fits working ‘vociferously to conflate crime and and starts (Morone, 2003; Gottschalk, 2006: disobedience, with its obvious extensions to ch. 3). Once Jim Crow came tumbling down civil rights’ (Weaver, 2006: 29). in the postwar decades, the path was clearer This was a doctrine not just of words for the rapid development of the criminal but also of deeds. Conservative southern justice system, which today disproportion- Democrats shrewdly used civil rights bills ately incarcerates African-Americans. as vehicles to stiffen and broaden criminal Recent scholarship on the carceral state penalties. These add-ons to civil rights legis- and the civil rights movement underscores lation experimented with certain sanctions this point. The conventional view of the that later became the central features of the origins of the contemporary law-and-order major federal and state-level crime bills of era is that rising crime rates in the 1960s the 1980s and 1990s, including stiff manda- prompted national leaders, most notably tory minimums, denial of federal benefits presidential candidates, to address the issue to people convicted of certain felonies, of street crime. This provided an opening for and sentencing enhancements for vaguely the Republican Party, beginning with Barry and capaciously defined violations, like riot- Goldwater in 1964, to undermine the New ing (Weaver, 2006: 27–8). Many urban white Deal liberal coalition by making appeals voters in the North initially maintained a to law and order that were really thinly veiled delicate balancing act on the civil rights racialized appeals to white voters. But new issue. While they opposed racial integration research provides a much more nuanced at the local level, they supported national account of how racial politics got funneled candidates who were pro-civil rights. This through criminal justice policies. Politicians split political personality became less tena- so readily identified today as penal hard- ble as crime and disorder ‘became the ful- liners, such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan crum points at which the local and national

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 220909 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM 210 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

intersected’ (Flamm, 2005: 10), thus weaken- To sum up, the carceral state has become ing the New Deal coalition. a key governing institution in the USA. Its The significance of race in unsettling the construction has deep historical and institu- New Deal coalition and building the carceral tional roots. Contrary to the popular view, state has long been recognized, if not always law and order has been a central, not inciden- well understood. By contrast, gender is just tal, issue in national and local politics for beginning to be recognized as an important much of US history. Struggles over penal contributing factor to more punitive policies policy and punishment have had ‘important and mass imprisonment. New scholarship and lasting consequences’ for ‘the structure reveals that politicians of all stripes, includ- and legitimating fictions of American social ing Goldwater, George Wallace, Lyndon order more generally’ (McLennan, 2008: 3). Johnson, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush Political elites in the USA have a long history and Bill Clinton, strategically used highly of raising law-and-order concerns in an gendered appeals related to crime and attempt to further their own political for- punishment to further their political and tunes. And Americans have a long history electoral agendas (Flamm, 2005: 42, 45, 51, of periodic intense anxiety about crime 178; Bosworth, 2010). They promulgated and disorder. Yet only recently have these the politically potent – but highly mislead- concerns and anxieties resulted in such a ing – image of white women, preyed on by dramatic and unprecedented transformation strangers, as the most likely victims of vio- of penal policies in such a punitive direction. lent crime. But leading politicians were By understanding the deeper institutional not the only culprits in feminizing the crime and political context, we can begin to grasp issue. why elite political preferences for a war Women’s groups and feminists in the on crime premised on a massive expansion USA have a long and conflicted history on of the penal system triumphed beginning in issues related to crime, punishment, and law the 1960s despite public opinion polls per- and order. Periodically, they have played sistently showing that public sentiment on central roles in defining violence as a threat crime and punishment was quite fluid. to the social order and pushing for more enhanced policing powers to address law- and-order concerns (Gottschalk, 2006: chs 5 and 6). The women’s reform movements THE CARCERAL STATE AT THE and waves of feminist agitation that have STATE AND LOCAL LEVELS appeared off and on since the 19th century in the USA helped to construct institutions and Among the many political questions about establish practices that bolstered stridently what propelled the turn to mass incarcera- conservative tendencies in penal policy. For tion, one in particular remains central: why example, because of stark differences in were law-and-order conservatives able to the historical and institutional context, launch an expensive prison-building spree demands by women’s groups in the 1970s that spanned decades even though the bur- and 1980s to address the issues of rape and geoning conservative movement they spear- domestic violence had more far-reaching headed was premised on fiscal conservatism penal consequences in the USA than other and rolling back the public sector? New case countries where burgeoning women’s move- studies of the development of penal policy ments also identified these two issues as at the state level are beginning to unravel this central concerns.2 As a consequence, the puzzle. This research identifies some common women’s movement helped facilitate con- factors that help explain what propelled the servative law-and-order politics in the USA prison boom at the state level, as well as but not Europe. some differences that account for variations

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221010 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 211

in the timing, extent and nature of the puni- California Department of Corrections (CDC) tive turn among the states. in 1982 by forming the Joint Legislative One of the most puzzling cases is Committee on Prison Construction and California, which was a trailblazer for the Operations (JLCPCO). This reorganization ‘rehabilitative ideal’ in the 1940s and 1950s plan inured the CDC from the longstanding and ground zero for the taxpayer revolt of the bidding and budget practices required of 1970s and 1980s. With passage of Proposition other state agencies. The creation of the 13 in 1978, which capped property taxes JLCPCO also ensured that elected officials and deprived municipal governments of key vulnerable to the powerful sway of law- revenues, California faced growing opposi- and-order politics would be closely and pub- tion to tax increases and expansion of the licly monitoring the CDC’s activities. public sector. Nonetheless the Golden State Moreover, the JLCPCO was required to has been able to build approximately two- hold public hearings, which provided the dozen prisons (at a cost of about US$280– CDC with a highly visible platform to prom- 350 million each) since 1982. This is twice ulgate dire projections about an imminent as many as it constructed in the first century prison-overcrowding crisis and to promote after statehood. California also added about a vast expansion in the state’s penal system. two-dozen smaller penal facilities (Gilmore, A dramatic increase in the CDC’s planning 2007: 7–8). Over the last quarter century, capacity allowed the agency, beginning in spending on corrections has quadrupled in 1984, to produce alarmist five-year master California, jumping from 2 to 8 percent of plans (Gilmore, 2007: 96). the general fund (Gilmore, 2007: 8–10). These predictions, however dire, would Even in the face of fiscal Armageddon and a not be enough to neutralize rising public federal court decision declaring that the reluctance to pay for more state services, state’s overcrowded, underfunded penal especially prisons. With the shadow of Propo- system is unconstitutional (which was upheld sition 13 looming over them, legislators in May 2011 by a divided US Supreme Court and other state officials were increasingly in Brown v. Plata), California has been doubtful that taxpayers would support new unable to agree on a plan to shrink its penal prison bond packages at the polls. With the population significantly. help of the state’s financial sector, California In California and other Western (Edgerton, turned to lease-revenue bonds (LRB’s) as a 2004) and Southern states, the postwar backdoor way to fund new prison construc- establishment of statewide departments of tion that allowed legislators and corrections corrections to oversee their penal facilities, administrators to maneuver around anti-tax which had been run largely as independent, sentiment. patronage-ridden fiefdoms, was a critical LRB’s skirted states’ balanced budget development. This gave states the capacity rules, as well as requirements that voters for the first time to develop integrated penal must ratify new government bond projects. systems, pursue large-scale prison construc- They originally were designed to provide tion schemes, and respond to national trends financing for projects that could generate in penal policy, if lawmakers chose to do so. enough revenue over time to pay for them- When legislators sought to build up their selves. LRB’s typically had been used to penal capacity, they often enacted measures finance items like mortgages for veterans and that exempted their departments of correc- farmers and construction loans for hospitals, tions from key oversight, budgeting and colleges and universities. In a creative sleight financial rules that applied to other state of public financing, money that corrections agencies. departments would use to ‘pay back’ the In the case of California, the legislature LRB’s was considered ‘revenue’ even though reorganized its statutory relationship with the it came from general fund appropriations

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221111 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM 212 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

authorized to the corrections department California’s massive prison expansion by the legislature in the annual operating entailed a massive expansion of the correc- budget. tions workforce at just the time that the These revenue bonds became a popular scrappy prison officers’ association, which way to finance new prison construction in originally resembled a social club or fraternal California and elsewhere beginning in the organization, was transforming itself into a mid-1980s. Prior to that, new prisons had to powerful, militant and fiercely independent be funded either on a pay-as-you-go basis out union (Page, 2011b). Under forceful and of general revenue funds or by borrowing savvy leadership, the California Correctional money through the sale of government bonds Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) set out sanctioned by taxpayers through bond refer- in the 1980s to capitalize politically and endums (Pranis, 2007: 37). By 1996, more financially on the prison boom already under- than half of all new prison debt was in the way to assure that the boom did not lose its form of LRB’s, which tend to be more expen- momentum. Wielding its financial largesse, sive than straightforward state bond sales the union rewarded allies with generous cam- (Pranis, 2007: 38). The new-fangled LRB’s paign contributions and punished foes with allowed the huge costs of the prison build-up well-funded primary challengers and dispar- and the budgetary trade-offs they necessi- aging and mean-spirited public attacks. It tated (notably the conspicuous drop in public almost single-handedly created the powerful funding for higher education) to stay obscured victims’ rights movement in the Golden State from public view. And LRB’s could be that has pushed so hard for more punitive quickly organized and issued. In less than a legislation, including the toughest three- decade, California’s state debt for prison strikes law in the country. The union deployed construction exploded from about 4 percent its political resources to create the ‘specter of to over 16 percent of the state’s total debt for the CCPOA’ – an image of a ‘ruthless, unpre- all purposes (Gilmore, 2007: 101). dictable and powerful labor organization’ The CDC has been extremely inept at (Page, 2011b: 65). It successfully framed the managing what goes on inside its prisons union’s interests in terms of the public good and the other facilities of its vast penal and reached out to minority groups by cele- empire, in part because of organized resist- brating diversity (but only once the union had ance from the powerful prison guards’ union more Hispanic, black and female members) and contract provisions that give the guards and by funding ethnic- and gender-based enormous latitude on the job (Page, 2011b: criminal justice organizations and political ch. 7). However, the department has been action committees. highly capable when it comes to building The CCPOA also framed its actions in more prisons. Like corrections departments highly charged moral terms. It portrayed in many other states, the CDC pushed prison prison guards as the frontline in an epic battle construction as a key tool of rural economic between good and evil, hence the union’s development. The CDC’s Prison Siting longstanding motto, ‘The Toughest Beat Office was extremely effective at persuading in the State’. Subtly and not so subtly, the economically distressed communities that a union exploited negative racial stereotypes. new prison in their midst would bring them It charged that inmates in the state’s prisons an economic windfall. The office strategically were the worst of the worst and beyond targeted rural communities, figuring they redemption. One of its public relations videos would be an easier sell than urban areas after portrayed typical California inmates, in the CDC became embroiled in a nasty fight the words of Page, as ‘big, black, brutish with community and religious groups who gang members armed with homemade opposed building a new lockup in an East shanks’ who hunt ‘their prey: prison officers’ Los Angeles neighborhood (Gilmore, 2007). (2011b: 81).

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221212 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 213

The CCPOA’s political savvy and the Beginning in the 1960s, the state became financial sector’s underwriting savvy do more politically competitive as right-leaning not on their own explain why California Republicans made serious electoral inroads succeeded in launching a massive expansion and pockets of progressive Democrats chal- of the public sector despite rising fiscal con- lenged the party’s old guard, especially servatism and anti-tax sentiment. Drawing in more urbanized areas. This new politi- on key insights from Vanessa Barker’s (2009) cal competition set the stage for the hyper- comparative study of the development of politicization of penal policy, as the ‘practical, penal policy in California, New York and collaborative’ style of lawmaking yielded to Washington State, Page argues that the more ‘symbolic, partisan-based’ legislating Golden State’s political culture and institu- (Lynch, 2010: 113). Legislators and state tions have rendered it especially vulnerable officials generally did not retreat from their to the siren call of law-and-order politics. hard line even in the face of reports from the California’s ‘neopopulist political culture department of corrections and elsewhere pre- and institutions’, most notably its ballot dicting that the proposed harsh sentencing initiatives and its relatively low levels of regime would necessitate a massive increase civic engagement, helped foster the CCPOA’s in spending on corrections or that the vast disproportionate influence, according to Page prison expansion had had no measurable (2011a). impact on the state’s crime rate (Lynch, Like California, Arizona is another Sunbelt 2010: 95, 149). state that has been a main cauldron of the As in the case of California, legislators ascendant conservative movement premised and governors instigated the prison boom but on fiscal conservatism and disdain for the other groups mobilized subsequently to spur public sector. Nonetheless it, too, embarked it on. Unlike in California, victims’ rights on a huge, costly penal expansion. Home groups and unionized prison guards did to Barry Goldwater, fiscal frugality has long not propel the boom. Law enforcement offic- been the ‘guiding principle of all govern- ers, notably prosecutors and sheriffs who ment endeavors in Arizona’ (Lynch, 2010: shrewdly used the media, played a key role 25). For its entire history until the late 1970s, in Arizona. They mobilized to defend and Arizona had doggedly resisted making a big extend the harsh sentencing regime imposed investment in new penal facilities (Lynch, in the 1970s and helped scuttle major prison 2010: 111). Yet between 1971 and 2000, the reform proposals in the early 1990s to reduce state’s incarceration rate increased nearly the incarcerated population as severe eco- sevenfold, going from a stable and minuscule nomic distress gripped the state. Instead, 75 per 100,000 (a rate comparable to that the reform efforts of the early 1990s morphed of the Scandinavian countries today) to more into yet another round of get-tough legisla- than 500 per 100,000. Spending on correc- tion (Lynch, 2010: 155). At the time, leading tions skyrocketed, escalating from 4 percent state officials were so committed to punitive of the general fund in 1979 to nearly 11 per- segregation that the governor and director cent in 2003 (Lynch, 2010: 171). As the prison of corrections even supported turning down a population grew, the department of correc- private grant awarded to develop alternatives tions solidified its position ‘as one of the larg- to incarceration (Lynch, 2010: 165). est and most politically influential state Several factors helped neutralize or agencies in Arizona’ (Lynch, 2010: 172). deflect concerns about how the huge size and Lynch portrays the embrace of the growing expense of the penal system were carceral state in Arizona as largely a top- at odds with Arizona’s historical commit- down phenomenon. Until the 1950s, Arizona ment to frugality and a limited public sector. looked like a traditional one-party Southern Administrators and state officials stressed state dominated by conservative Democrats. how the state’s penal system was ‘cheap and

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221313 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM 214 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

mean’ (Lynch, 2010: 213). At every opportu- The rehabilitative ideal never really took root nity they underscored their frugality. ‘[T]he in Arizona, partly because of the state’s commitment to frugality spilled over as an historic reliance on the widespread use of expressive value to administrative opera- corporal punishment, degrading rituals and tions,’ explains Lynch. ‘So even when actual paramilitary style discipline in its jails and spending was profligate … such expendi- prisons. Whenever outsiders were recruited tures were sold politically to the populace as to run Arizona’s penal system, they generally both necessary and cost-efficient’ (2010: faced fierce resistance to importing new 213, original emphasis). ideas like rehabilitation and the more humane In their public statements and in the treatment of prisoners, as did outsiders annual reports of the department of correc- selected to helm the penal systems of other tions, state officials celebrated cost saving states, notably Florida and Texas (Schoenfeld, measures like reducing the use of heat and 2009; Perkinson, 2010). air-conditioning in prisons, leveling more As spending for corrections skyrocketed fees on inmates and their families, purchas- in Arizona, state officials emphasized how ing ‘seconds’ of damaged or old food from they were toughening up life behind bars wholesalers, and cutting off the electricity for inmates. Arizona became a leader in not on cellblocks during the day. They even her- only incarcerating its citizens but also in pio- alded the cost savings to be had by the neering the widespread use of supermax conversion of the Death House to accommo- prisons and humiliating and degrading pun- date lethal injection (Lynch, 2010: 142). Joe ishments like chain gangs. Beginning in the Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa County since mid-1990s, prison guards routinely deployed 1993, boasted how he spent only 20 cents a pepper gas and Israeli foggers on inmates. day feeding inmates in his jails, thanks in In 1997, the director of corrections author- part to his infamous ‘green bologna’ (Lynch, ized the use of attack dogs in cell extractions. 2010: 164). State officials also stressed the The dogs were trained to bite and hold on exploitation of penal labor to save money, as the inmate was pulled from his cell by noting that farming industries were run an animal attached to a 30-foot leash (Lynch, almost entirely by prison labor, and that 2010: 169). This increasingly punitive all prison construction projects were required approach faced little resistance from any by law to use inmate labor (Lynch, 2010: constituencies with political power in Arizona 129). To make the point that programming (Lynch, 2010: 170). for inmates was useless, one director of cor- State officials in Arizona attacked the rections in Arizona noted that Minnesota reputed ‘good life’ in prison by requiring spent twice as much per inmate yet had a inmates to do a stint of hard labor during recidivism rate comparable to Arizona’s their confinement and by imposing new (Lynch, 2010: 173). In its annual reports, restrictions on clothes, grooming, personal Arizona’s department of corrections ‘prided items, visitors and compassionate leave itself on spending significantly less than the (Lynch, 2010: 128). Alleged luxuries like national average on inmates’ (Lynch, 2010: television, weight-lifting equipment, access 172). This deflected attention from the fact to the courts, and even suntan lotion for that as of 1999 Arizona ‘ranked among the inmates working in the blazing Arizona sun top three states in the nation in terms of the came under attack. As in the case of California, proportion of the state budget allocated to Arizona’s legislators moved to exempt the corrections’ (Lynch, 2010: 171). state’s department of corrections from key Lynch chronicles the origins and develop- rules that applied to other state agencies, ment of get-tough policies in Arizona and including a requirement that the state give suggests this state has become a national notice and hold public hearings on all major trendsetter in meting out harsh punishment. changes in rules and practices. This change

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221414 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 215

‘contributed to the acceleration of the fla- political momentum to propel the Prison grant punitiveness of Arizona prisons’ (Lynch, Litigation Reform Act through the US Con- 2010: 140). gress in 1996. This measure greatly restricted Arizona’s department of corrections and inmates’ access to the courts to challenge governor’s office doggedly fought to disman- their conditions of confinement. In short, tle the limited federal protections the courts Arizona was a ‘trailblazer that ultimately had extended to prisoners beginning in the reshaped the national landscape of prisoner 1960s. State officials demonized federal litigation’ (Lynch, 2010: 203), as were Texas judges and other officials and groups who (Perkinson, 2010) and Florida (Schoenfeld, attempted to intervene in the operation of the 2009). penal system. They kept the public focus The gains of prisoner litigation in Arizona on states’ rights issues and on allegations of and elsewhere were extremely limited. After excessive federal intrusion. State officials some initial victories, a backlash was in full raged that Arizona’s prisons had become force by the late 1980s. State officials faced such a fiscal burden because of onerous and little resistance because of the absence of intrusive federal regulation and oversight organized pressure from the grass-roots to of the state’s penal system. They also blamed behave differently (Lynch, 2010: 217). Few federal permissiveness to inmate lawsuits. organizations in Arizona were willing and Their withering attacks on Washington and able to challenge the erosion of prisoners’ the federal judiciary obscured the fact that rights. Most of the push to defend prisoners’ the prison boom in Arizona had radically rights came from outside the state, notably increased the power of the state government, the US Department of Justice and the national the size of the public sector, and the fiscal office of the American Civil Liberties Union burden of the penal system. (ACLU). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Lynch (2010), Perkinson (2010) and state scrambled to comply with federal con- others suggest that Arizona, Texas and other sent decrees concerning overcrowding and Sunbelt states are the forerunners of a lead- other violations. By the mid-1980s or so, ing alternative model of criminal justice the governor, the head of the department premised on maximum control at minimum of corrections and other state officials took cost with little outside oversight. Never very a ‘new oppositional stance’ to prisoner law- attached to the rehabilitative model to begin suits and federal oversight (Lynch, 2010: with, they became the crucibles for get-tough 180). The department of corrections openly innovations like three-strikes laws, boot defied earlier decrees in the name of budget- camps, the widespread use of solitary con- ary constraints and aggressively sought to finement through supermax cells, the revival overturn a landmark court decision extending of chain gangs, the exploitation of penal prisoners’ rights. Arizona’s 1996 Supreme labor and an uncompromising defiance of Court victory in Lewis v. Casey, which sig- federal intervention and oversight. nificantly curtailed the rights established in Perkinson (2010) draws much needed the 1977 Bounds v. Smith decision, embold- attention to the case of Texas, which operates ened state officials (Lynch, 2010: 186). The the country’s largest state prison system, state refused to pay special master’s fees in imprisoning today more people than Germany, federal consent decrees and challenged them France, Belgium and the Netherlands com- in the courts. It denied the federal Department bined. Like Arizona, Texas stands out not just of Justice access to state prisons to investi- for the sheer number of people under state gate charges of widespread employee sexual control but also for the persistently brutal and misconduct involving prisoners (Lynch, inhumane conditions of their confinement. In 2010: 197). State officials in Arizona pro- graphic and often disturbing detail, Perkinson vided the legislative blueprint and crucial chronicles the many ways punishment

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221515 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM 216 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

repeatedly has been used in Texas ‘to assert run by penal labor inside ‘The Walls’ that supremacy and debase prisoners’ since the became the state’s largest factory by far. state built its first penitentiary in 1848 During the Civil War this mill was a main (Perkinson, 2010: 129). source of tents, uniforms and supply bags In Texas, as in Arizona, rehabilitation was for the Confederacy. Imperial Sugar Co., largely treated as a fad. It took a backseat today the largest sugar refinery in the USA, to maintaining maximum control of inmates was established with slave capital after the through surveillance, censorship, fierce Civil War. Convicts leased from the state staff solidarity, widespread use of solitary built the refinery and supplied it with sugar confinement and relentless self-promotion of grown at Sugar Land, a massive estate estab- the Texas control model (Perkinson, 2010: lished outside of San Antonio after the war. 237). State officials also sought to exploit The evolution and growth of Texas’s inmate labor to make prisons and penal farms penal system ‘has had surprisingly little to as productive as possible because, as George do with crime’ and much to do with ‘America’s J. Beto, the director of the Texas Department troubled history of racial conflict and social of Corrections, told the American Correctional stratification’, Perkinson (2010: 8) contends. Association in 1970, ‘the tax-conscious As segregationist barriers like slavery and constituent will demand it’ (Perkinson, 2010: Jim Crow fell, new ones like for-profit 235). Perkinson argues that Texas developed convict leasing and later the Texas ‘control an alternative ‘control model’ of punishment model’, with its stress on maximum disci- that was unapologetically premised on offi- pline and maximum profit, took their place. cially sanctioned violence, strident exploita- Prisons have proliferated in Texas and tion of penal labor, a strong retributive urge elsewhere despite their breathtaking human and stark racial stratification. He identifies costs and minimal effect on crime control slavery as the progenitor of the state’s control because ‘they excel in other, generally unspo- mode. For well over a century now, Texas has ken ways, at dispersing patronage, fortifying operated a vast archipelago of self-sustaining social hierarchies, enacting public venge- penal labor farms on the old plantation lands ance, and symbolizing government resolve’ of East Texas. These farms are ‘probably (Perkinson, 2010: 10). the best example of slavery remaining in the One notable difference between Arizona country,’ according to a national corrections and Texas is that the failures and abuses expert (quoted in Perkinson, 2010: 6). of the Lone Star State’s penal system have Suspicious of large state projects, Texas, periodically spurred reform movements since like much of the South, was initially slow the 19th century. The most successful penal to embrace the penitentiary in the 19th cen- reform movements in Texas over the last tury. Fearful that these large public buildings century and a half did not act in isolation would become ‘vampire[s] upon the public but were buoyed by other social movements. treasury’, government officials in Texas Once these reform movements sputtered and elsewhere sought to make their penal out, they often left behind different but argu- enterprises not just self-sustaining but also ably no less brutal systems of punishment highly profitable (Perkinson, 2010: 73). Over and confinement. The Populists of the late the years, state officials were obsessed with 19th century were pivotal players in the push turning a profit out of penal labor. Texas’s to end convict leasing in Texas and elsewhere first penitentiary, a fortress erected in in the South. After a half-century of public Huntsville that is still known as ‘The Walls’ agitation over the corruption and horrors today, was the state’s premier public institu- associated with leasing convicts to private, tion, consuming nearly 17 percent of the for-profit firms, Texas outlawed this practice. state’s budget in its first year. In the 1850s, Brutal state-controlled chain gangs and penal the state constructed a massive cotton mill labor farms took its place. Women’s groups

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221616 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 217

linked to the Progressive movement sought He received no credit for the drop in the to end sexual abuse and other atrocities in state’s incarceration rate, which coincided Texan prisons and on its penal farms. They with the first decline in serious crime in played a vital role in the election of Governor Texas in years. When Clements returned Dan Moody, who launched a far-reaching to office in 1987, he pushed for a major but short-lived penal reform agenda in the prison expansion with the help of business late 1920s that was inspired by experiments leaders and law enforcement groups, notably with rehabilitation in the North in places the Texas District and County Attorneys like Sing Sing, Auburn and Bedford Hills Association (TDCAA) and the Criminal (Perkinson, 2010: 189–90, 197–8). A colos- Justice Task Force, which the administration sal bribery scandal in 1972 opened the way established to coordinate efforts to pass an for an influx of progressive reformers into anti-crime and prison expansion package the Texas legislature who pursued a short- (Campbell, 2011). Even though Texas was in lived penal reform agenda in the late 1970s dire economic straits and economic issues and early 1980s that helped stave off a penal dominated the 1986 election, Clements suc- expansion. cessfully pushed through a major general The prison boom was slower to take off obligation bond for prison expansion bundled in Texas than Arizona or California. It was within a larger set of bonds, jettisoning a not until the early 1990s that the Lone Star longstanding commitment to pay-as-you-go State’s incarceration rate leapfrogged ahead fiscal management. The 1979 landmark of California’s and the rest of the South’s Ruiz v. Estelle decision, which found Texas’s (Campbell, 2011). In a familiar story, as overcrowded and unhealthy prisons to be Republicans made electoral inroads in the unconstitutional, provided Clements and state in the 1980s and as old guard Democrats other hard-liners with an opportunity to vied with pockets of progressive Democrats, expand the state’s penal system and to the stage was set for the hyper-politicization bureaucratize and professionalize its control of penal policy in a retributive, law-and-order model. Penal hard-liners faced little resist- direction. Governor William P. Clements, ance because they operated in a political who in 1978 became the first Republican culture characterized by low levels of politi- to lead the state since Reconstruction, sought cal participation (including low voter turnout to solidify his political base by mobilizing and the absence of statewide civic associa- law enforcement groups on behalf of a tions) by African-Americans, low-income more punitive agenda (Campbell, 2011). His people and Mexican-Americans, which were tools included targeted mailings, a media the groups most likely to be ensnared in the campaign, crafty lobbying and strategic state’s widening dragnet.3 appointments to powerful quasi-government Penal politics in Texas has not been exclu- anti-crime commissions and task forces that sively a top-down process. Prisoners them- generally excluded representatives from selves have played a pivotal role in penal high-crime communities, supporters of alter- reform in Texas that has been overlooked. natives to incarceration, and even victims’ In his revisionist account of the demise of rights groups (Campbell, 2011). convict leasing, Perkinson contends that the Clements’s successor, Democrat Mark escapes, strikes, mutinies and riots of leased White, attempted to use early release pro- convicts, and their angry and mournful letters grams to manage the state’s overcrowding and memoirs documenting their abusive crisis. But the media and the newly mobi- living conditions helped bring about the lized law enforcement community, notably end of this practice. When traditional avenues the professional associations for the sheriffs, of protest were blocked, prisoners would the police and especially the state’s district increasingly turn to self-mutilation, such as attorneys, vilified him for doing so. cutting off a limb or packing a self-inflicted

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221717 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1411:53:14 AMAM 218 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

wound with lye or injecting themselves with vocational, substance abuse and educational kerosene, in order to get some relief from programs. Recently Texas enacted a slew of backbreaking field labor and to protest the penal reforms aimed at shrinking its prison horrid conditions of their confinement. population, but its incarceration rate stub- Initially, these self-mutilations did not have bornly remains the second highest in the a wider political impact. But as the number country (Fabelo, 2010). If Perkinson’s analy- of self-mutilations rose into the hundreds sis is correct, the Lone Star State will not each year in Texas in the early 1940s and the begin shuttering its prisons without enor- practice spread to other states, it became mous political pressure. impossible for state officials and enterprising The control model pioneered by Texas journalists to ignore the abhorrent conditions and exported to other states has become a that provoked the bloody protests. key tool to manage an increasingly diverse Coinciding with the rise of the civil rights society ridden with many politically and movement, prisoners began looking to the economically marginalized groups in Texas, courts for relief. But as Perkinson shows, Arizona and elsewhere. But the Lone Star state and prison officials in Texas were as State ultimately may be more successful than determined as those in Arizona to maintain Arizona in instituting penal reforms that the core features of the control model. They make sizable cuts its incarceration rate. eventually eviscerated many of the court- Unlike Arizona, Texas has a history of peri- ordered reforms after wars of attrition played odic bursts of penal protest movements linked out in the legal arena. Perkinson devotes to wider social movements. Moreover, the nearly two chapters to the case of David get-tough, anti-federal stance has been form- Resendez Ruíz, the lead plaintiff in a land- ative for the political identity of many state mark federal lawsuit brought against Texas’s officials in Arizona. This helps explain why prison system in the 1970s. Battered around the pivotal 1977 overhaul of its criminal code in the courts for about two decades, Ruíz v. and the 1993 modifications of the code Estelle eventually brought about some sig- that drove the prison boom remain largely nificant changes in the state’s penal system. untouchable as one economic crisis after But indirectly it also ‘helped create an equally another has buffeted the state (Lynch, 2010: severe and infinitely larger prison system 223–4). in its place’ (Perkinson, 2010: 253). As for Ruíz, he was kept in solitary confinement in a cramped, dank dungeon-like cell for dec- ades after the lawsuit was settled. Just months THE WIDER POLITICAL before he died in 2005, he was moved to a CONSEQUENCES OF THE prison hospital after being denied medical CARCERAL STATE parole. As Perkinson dryly notes, Ruíz fought the law but the law ultimately won. For a long time, the expansion of the carceral If history is any guide, Texan prisons, state was widely viewed as a peripheral prob- already some of the toughest in the nation, lem in American politics and society that was could become even leaner and meaner in the largely confined to poor urban communities future. Vexed with growing budget deficits and minority groups. But the carceral state and a virulent anti-tax fever, government and has grown so huge that it has begun to metas- prison officials in Texas and elsewhere have tasize and directly impinge on fundamental been attempting to cut costs by privatizing democratic institutions. Scholars and penal more prisons and prison services, intensify- reformers have begun focusing attention ing their efforts to exploit penal labor on the wider political consequences of mass and slashing spending on inmates’ medical imprisonment. The carceral state bears down care, food and other penal ‘luxuries’ like on many central issues in contemporary

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221818 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 219

American politics, everything from broad democracies place few, if any, restrictions on questions about how we conceptualize the the right to vote for people with criminal American state to more specific ones con- convictions, including those in prison. The cerning voting rights, voter participation, USA not only disenfranchises most of its public opinion and changing conceptions of prisoners but also is the only democracy that citizenship. routinely disenfranchises large numbers of The political development of the carceral nonincarcerated offenders and ex-offenders – state challenges the common understanding people on parole or probation or who have of the US state as weak and is cause to completed their sentences (Manza and rethink our understanding of the US welfare Uggen, 2006: 38–9). The political impact state. The US state has developed an awe- of felon disenfranchisement in the USA is some power and an extensive apparatus to so huge because the number of people monitor, incarcerate and execute its citizens with felony convictions on their records is so that is unprecedented in modern US history huge (more than 16 million Americans, and among other Western countries. This according to Uggen et al., 2006) and because development raises deeply troubling ques- felon disenfranchisement laws have stark tions about the health of democratic institu- racial origins and racial consequences tions in the USA and the character of the (Brown-Dean, 2004; Pettus, 2005: chs. 3 and liberal state. As Mary Bosworth notes in her 5; Hull, 2006: ch. 2; Manza and Uggen, analysis of the origins, development, and 2006: ch. 2). More than one in seven black transformation of the US penal system from men in the USA is disenfranchised because the colonial era to today, ‘Imprisonment is, of his criminal record (Manza and Uggen, by nature, an articulation of state power’ 2006: 10). (2010: 22). Felon disenfranchisement raises funda- The emergence of the carceral state in mental questions about how we define (and the USA has revived interest in the ways redefine) citizenship (Ewald, 2002; Brown- in which punishment is a ‘uniquely reveal- Dean, 2004: ch. 2; Pettus, 2005). It also ing lens into how political regimes work’ may be a decisive factor in close elections. (McBride, 2007: 3). Political theorists have Manza and Uggen (2006) calculate that if focused in particular on how punishment Florida had not banned an estimated 800,000 is ‘a central problem for political administra- former felons from voting in the 2000 elec- tion that requires careful negotiation of the tion, Al Gore would have handily carried the stated ideals of a polity in the exercise of state and won the White House, a claim dis- power’ (McBride, 2007: 3). Some of them puted by Burch (2008). Manza and Uggen have been especially interested in the rela- (2006) also contend the Democratic Party tionship between the contemporary death might have controlled the US Senate for penalty, state sovereignty and the late liberal much of the 1990s had many former felons state (Sarat, 1999, 2001; Kaufman-Osborn, been permitted to vote (Manza and Uggen, 2002). 2006: 192–6). Their work implicitly chal- Voting rights and the carceral state is lenges claims about the sources of and degree another growing area of interest. The voting of political dominance of the Republican irregularities of the 2000 and 2004 presiden- Party in the 1980s and 1990s. If felon disen- tial elections drew enormous public atten- franchisement is factored in, the ascendancy tion to the plight of the estimated 5 million of the Republican Party may have been as Americans barred from voting by a maze much a function of locking out wide swaths of state laws that deny people with crimi- of the electorate as crafting a new, more con- nal records the right to vote, sometimes servative message that successfully appealed temporarily, sometimes permanently (Manza to Democrats disenchanted with the rem- and Uggen, 2006: v). Many established nants of the New Deal coalition.

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 221919 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 220 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

The felon disenfranchisement issue is the economic, political and social advance- cause to rethink another fundamental ques- ment of the most disadvantaged people in tion in the study of American politics: is the USA. Prison leaves them less likely to the American voter vanishing? Building on vote and to participate in other civic activi- earlier work by McDonald and Popkin ties, find gainful employment and maintain (2001),4 Manza and Uggen (2006: 177) con- ties with their families and communities tend that much of the so-called drop in voter (Roberts, 2003/2004; Pattillo et al., 2004). turnout may be a consequence of faulty cal- The landmark work on the collateral conse- culations and assumptions used in official quences of imprisonment is Bruce Western’s turnout statistics. The standard accounts fail (2006) Punishment and Inequality in America. to properly consider the large number of non- Western soberly concludes, after a careful citizens, prisoners, people on parole or pro- analysis of wage, employment, education bation and ex-felons who have been and other socioeconomic data, that mass disenfranchised by electoral laws and thus imprisonment has erased many of the ‘gains overstate the decline in voter turnout. to African-American citizenship hard won But the impact of mass imprisonment by the civil rights movement’ (2006: 191). on voter turnout and citizenship ties cuts Incarceration significantly reduces the wages, even deeper. Having a criminal conviction is employment, and annual income of former a more significant factor in depressing voter inmates (ch. 5). Incarceration also decreases turnout among offenders and ex-offenders the likelihood that they will get married or than formal legal barriers to voting (Burch, stay married and increases the risk of domes- 2007). Moreover, contact with the criminal tic violence for their partners (ch. 6). The justice system appears to have large negative hyper-incarceration of African-Americans effects not just on voting but also on civic also may help explain enduring racial dis- involvement and trust in government, thus parities in morbidity and mortality (Pettit fostering weak citizenship ties. Since people and Sykes, 2008: 7–8). These negative effects with convictions are concentrated within are concentrated among poor, uneducated, certain racial groups and certain geographic black men, drawing a sharp demarcation areas, the carceral state appears to be creat- between poor and middle-class blacks and ing a troubling phenomenon that Burch calls between poor blacks and the rest of society. ‘concentrated disenfranchisement’ (2007: ‘By cleaving off poor black communities chs 5 and 6). from the mainstream, the prison boom left Research by Burch (2007), Cohen (2010), America more divided,’ Western concludes Weaver and Lerman (2010) and others on (2006: 7). the impact of penal policies on political The carceral state raises other troubling and civic participation and by Bobo and and largely unexplored issues about political Thompson (2006) on criminal justice and participation and citizenship. Mass imprison- public opinion indicate that the carceral state ment is helping to create and legitimate a may be rapidly cleaving off wide swaths whole new understanding of citizenship of people in the USA from the promise of and belonging (Roberts, 2003/2004). Fixated the American Dream. The political conse- on the staggering increase in the number quences of this are potentially explosive of people behind bars, analysts have paid less because the American Dream has arguably attention to the political and social implica- been the country’s central ideology and has tions of the stunning rise in the number served as a kind of societal glue holding of people consigned to legal and civil purga- together otherwise disparate groups tory who are not fully in prison or fully a part (Hochschild, 1995). of society. On any given day, in addition to Evidence is growing that many of today’s the more than two million people sitting in crime control policies fundamentally impede jail or prison, another five million people are

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222020 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 221

on probation or parole or under some form of States prohibit former offenders from work- community supervision (Glaze et al., 2010). ing in scores of professions, including plumb- Parole and probation officers are permitted ing, palm reading, food catering, and even to regulate major and mundane aspects of haircutting, a popular trade in many prisons offenders’ lives – everything from where they (Hull, 2006: 33; Gottschalk, 2006: 22 n. 45). live and whom they associate with to whether A recent American Bar Association study they have a beer in their refrigerator and funded by the National Institute of Justice whether they are permitted to carry a cell counted 38,000 statutes that impose conse- phone (Beckett and Herbert, 2009). Many quences on people convicted of crimes people on parole or probation are subject to (Crime and Justice News, 2011). In April random drug tests. Law enforcement officers 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder urged also are permitted to conduct warrantless states to eliminate the legal burdens on searches of parolees and probationers that are former offenders that do not imperil public not subject to the standard Fourth Amendment safety, such as certain restrictions on housing protections. Goffman’s (2009) ethnographic and employment (Crime and Justice News, study of ‘life on the run’ in a poor neighbor- 2011). Many jurisdictions forbid employers hood in Philadelphia is a chilling account of to discriminate against job applicants solely how the expansive systems of policing and because of their criminal record unless their supervision that have accompanied the rise offense is directly relevant to the job. But of the carceral state have fostered a perni- applicants with criminal records are dis- cious climate of fear and suspicion that proportionately denied jobs (Pager, 2003, penetrates all aspects of daily life, including 2007), and rejected job seekers have great intimate and family relations, labor force difficulty getting redress in the courts (Hull, participation and access to medical care. 2006: 32–4). In some major cities, 80 percent Men on parole or probation and those with of young African-American men now have outstanding warrants, even for trivial offenses, criminal records (Street, 2002) and thus are avoid the police and the courts at all costs, subject to a ‘hidden underworld of legalized even when they are the victims of violent discrimination and permanent social exclu- attacks and other serious crimes, out of a sion’ (Alexander, 2010: 13). Wacquant char- justified fear they will be sent back to prison acterizes this underworld as ‘a closed circuit’ or jail (Goffman, 2009: 353). of perpetual social and legal marginality For many former offenders, their time in (Wacquant, 2000: 384). Alexander contends purgatory never ends, even after they have that the criminal justice system should not served their prison sentence or successfully be thought of as an independent system but completed their parole or probation. Former ‘rather as a gateway into a much larger felons (and some former misdemeanants) system of racial stigmatization and perma- risk losing the right to vote and also are nent marginalization’ (Alexander, 2010: 12, subject to other acts of ‘civil death’ that original emphasis). push them further and further to the politi- In a remarkable development, elaborate cal, social and economic margins. Former gradations of citizenship are on their way felons often must forfeit their pensions, to becoming a new norm in the USA. The disability benefits and veterans’ benefits. carceral state has helped to legitimize the Many of them are ineligible for public hous- idea of creating a very separate political and ing (Simon, 2007: 194–8), student loans or legal universe for whole categories of people. food stamps. Dozens of states and the federal These ‘partial citizens’ (Manza and Uggen, government ban former felons from jury 2006: 9) or ‘internal exiles’ (Simon, 2007: service for life. As a result, nearly one-third 175), be they felons, ex-felons, convicted of African-American men are permanently sex offenders, legal resident aliens, undocu- ineligible to serve as jurors (Kalt, 2003: 67).5 mented immigrants or people burdened with

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222121 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 222 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

banishment orders, are now routinely denied immigration service has become a mini- a range of rights and access to state resources.6 Bureau of Prisons. A notable recognition of Some ex-felons succeed in having their polit- this shift is the increasingly detailed account- ical rights restored, but it often involves ing of trends in immigration detention elaborate, capricious, intrusive and daunt- included in the Bureau of Justice Statistics ing procedures that establish a new standard biannual reports on the incarcerated popula- of ‘worthiness’ for political participation tion in the USA (for example, Sabol et al., (Goodnough, 2004). This is a modern-day rein- 2009: 10). In a remarkable development, carnation of earlier standards of worthiness, Latinos now represent the largest ethnic group such as the infamous literacy test. in the federal prison system. This is a conse- Another growing and related area of quence of the dramatic rise in immigration scholarly and public interest is the criminali- raids and prosecutions for immigration viola- zation of immigration policy (De Giorgi, tions, and the drop in federal prosecutions of 2006: ch. 5). In the case of immigrants, docu- other crimes, including gun trafficking, cor- mented and undocumented, a whole new ruption, organized crime and white-collar penal apparatus has been quietly under con- crime (Gorman, 2009). struction for decades. It operates under the Ironically, since people who cross the auspices of the US Immigration and Customs border illegally are not technically consid- Enforcement (formerly the Immigration and ered ‘criminals’, they have fewer legal pro- Naturalization Service) but has been largely tections and rights and often are subjected shielded from public and legal scrutiny. to more capricious and brutal conditions Changes in immigration policy over the past of confinement than citizens charged with 30 years or so have become new drivers of crimes (Dow, 2004). Secret detentions, phys- the carceral state (Bohrman and Murakawa, ical abuse, closed court proceedings, denial 2005). In the early 1980s, the Reagan admin- of contact with family members, attorneys istration ended the prevailing practice of and the media, notoriously arbitrary adminis- releasing undocumented immigrants pending trative reviews, ‘institutionalized anti-Arab administrative proceedings. Two landmark bias’ (Dow, 2004: 211), indefinite detentions pieces of legislation in 1996 - the Antiterrorism and state resistance to habeas corpus reviews and Effective Death Penalty Act and the have long been the standard operating proce- Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant dures of the parallel universe of immigrant Responsibility Act - dramatically expanded detention. Recent scholarship on immigrant the categories of crimes for which legal resi- detention and the carceral state is cause to dents could be deported and eliminated many rethink and reexamine the conventional view opportunities for waivers. A conviction for that the 9/11 attacks were the catalyst for simple battery or shoplifting with a one-year a drastic shift in immigration policy. In fact, suspended sentence could be cause to trigger there appears to be a remarkable continuum mandatory detention and deportation (Dow, between the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 treat- 2004: 173–4). During the debate over the ment of immigrants, with the differences immigration reform bill that imploded in being primarily in degree, not kind. mid-2007, an amendment was even proposed that called for the mandatory detention of anyone who overstayed his or her visa (New York Times, 2007: A22). ‘GOVERNING THROUGH CRIME’ The number of people held in special detention centers and elsewhere on any given The criminalization of immigration policy is day has increased more than eleven-fold just one example of how the ‘technologies, since the early 1970s (calculated from discourses, and metaphors of crime and Dow, 2004: 7–9; Kolodner, 2006: C1) as the criminal justice’ have been migrating to all

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222222 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 223

kinds of institutions and public policies that criminalized. Schools have been prisonized seem far afield from crime fighting (Simon, with the proliferation of school-based police 2007: 4). A new civil and political order officers, drug sweeps, uniforms, metal detec- based on ‘governing through crime’ has been tors, zero-tolerance rules and the greater use in the making for decades. The war on crime of sanctions like detention and expulsion has created imbalances in the political system. (Simon, 2007: 222–6). The US Department of Justice and the office Governing through crime has transformed of the attorney general have swollen at the the everyday lives of not just the poor and expense of other parts of the federal govern- disadvantaged but also of the middle class. ment. The power of the prosecutor has Lyons and Drew (2006) describe in chilling expanded at the expense of judges, defense detail how paramilitary police and a menac- attorneys and other actors in the criminal ing K-9 unit of drug-sniffing dogs carry out justice system. Perhaps even more signifi- ‘lockdowns’ and random drug searches at cantly, the all-powerful, largely unaccounta- an affluent suburban high school. In their ble prosecutor has become the new model tale of two schools in Ohio – a suburban high for exercising executive authority in the school and an inner-city one – they show USA. In word and deed, mayors, governors how politicians and lawmakers strategically and presidents increasingly fashion them- cultivate an excessive fear of crime and vio- selves as ‘prosecutors-in-chief’. They ‘define lence ‘to divest from any notion of public their objectives in prosecutorial terms’, frame education as a democratic social good’ (Lyons ‘political issues in the language shaped by and Drew, 2006: 4). Students, teachers and public insecurity and outrage about crime’ communities internalize the ‘zero-tolerance and push for vast expansions of executive culture’ foisted on them, making it difficult power (Simon, 2007: 35). to resist the ‘transformation of schools from The war on crime has fundamentally recast sites of democratic education to sites of both governmental and nongovernmental social control and punishment’ (2006: 90). institutions in the USA, according to Simon The suburbs and suburban life have been (2007). In the new regime, criminal analo- fortified; so has the workplace. With the gies are wielded in many diverse settings, decline of organized labor and collective bar- from homes to schools to the workplace. gaining and the retreat of the state in regulat- Principals, teachers, parents and employers ing the workplace, employers increasingly all gain authority and are viewed as acting are using the crime issue to establish their legitimately if they can redefine family, dominance on the job (Simon, 2007: 246). education or workplace issues as criminal Their tools include the widespread use of matters. drug testing and other forms of intensive sur- Decades ago ‘racial inequality was the veillance and the dismissal of employees for pivot around which the federal government off-the-job infractions like domestic violence mandated a vast reworking in the way schools and drug abuse. were governed at the state and local levels’ (Simon, 2007: 9). Now, Simon contends, it is crime. The federal Safe Schools Act 1994 and the state-level Safe Schools Acts it THE CARCERAL STATE AND spawned singled out crime control as the THE WELFARE STATE main vehicle for improving public education. In introducing his No Child Left Behind The emergence of the carceral state is cause Act 2001, President George W. Bush cast to reconsider how we think about the US educational failure and crime in the schools welfare state. Western’s portrait in Punishment as parallel problems. As a result of these and and Inequality of the deteriorating labor- other measures, educational policy has been market position of poor, unskilled blacks is

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222323 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 224 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

at odds with the conventional view that the violence courts and parole and probation US labor market outperforms the labor mar- officers not only monitor the behavior of kets of Western Europe. His account under- offenders but also often provide key links to mines the widespread claim that the USA, dwindling social services and employment with its relatively unregulated labor market, and educational opportunities. Wacquant weak unions and stingy welfare benefits, suggests that it is untenable to analyze is better at reducing unemployment, espe- social and penal policy in isolation from one cially for low-skilled workers, than ‘nanny another because they are so enmeshed today states’, such as France, Italy and Germany. and have been for a long time (Wacquant, ‘The invisible disadvantage produced by 2009: 13). mass imprisonment challenges this account Wacquant provocatively suggests that the of how meager social protections benefit the USA (and perhaps other developed coun- least-skilled workers’, according to Western tries) is groping toward a new kind of state, (2006: 104). Moreover, state regulation of one he calls the ‘centaur state’, which is the poor did not recede in the USA in the ‘guided by a liberal head mounted on an 1990s, it merely shifted course. The govern- authoritarian body’. What he really means ment significantly increased its role in regu- is a neoliberal head – where the doctrine lating the lives of poor, uneducated men and of laissez faire rules with respect to the social women by sweeping more and more of them inequalities produced by largely unregulated up into the criminal justice system’s growing capital and labor markets – that is attached dragnet (Western, 2006: 105). to a body that is ‘brutally paternalistic and As Wacquant (2009), Beckett and Western punitive’ (Wacquant, 2009: 43). (2001), and others have documented, the The disadvantages that mass imprison- carceral state has expanded at the expense ment confers on the most disadvantaged of the welfare state. By a number of meas- members of American society has remained ures – expenditures, personnel, congressional largely invisible for many reasons, some hearings and legislation – the law enforce- political, some analytical, and some, a com- ment apparatus has been growing while bination of the two. For example, the US social welfare provision has been contract- census veils and distorts the wider impact ing. Some states have experienced a direct of the carceral state (Gottschalk, 2007). How dollar-for-dollar trade-off as budgets for to tabulate prisoners was one of the most higher education shrank and corrections vexing issues for the US Census Bureau as budgets grew. States and countries that spend it prepared for the 2010 census. The bureau more on social welfare tend to have rela- chose to enumerate prisoners as residents of tively lower incarceration rates (Sutton, 2004; the towns and counties where they are incar- Downes and Hansen, 2006). Communities cerated. But most inmates have no personal that are not ridden with economic and racial or civic ties to these communities and almost stratifications also appear to have lower always return to their home neighborhoods crime rates, especially for violent crime upon release. (Peterson and Krivo, 2010). The way prisoners currently are counted Examined more closely, what we may be has enormous and unsettling political and seeing is not so much the contraction of the economic consequences. In every state except welfare state as its absorption by the carceral Maine and Vermont, imprisoned felons are state, which has become the primary regula- barred from voting. Yet these disenfranchised tor of the poor and a main conduit of social prisoners are included in the population tal- services for the poor and disadvantaged. Jails lies used for Congressional reapportionment and prisons in the USA are now responsible and for redistricting state House and Senate for the largest number of mentally ill people seats, city councils and other government in the country. Drug courts and domestic bodies. This practice dilutes the votes of

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222424 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 225

urban areas and of rural areas without pris- incarcerated (Western, 2006: 87). Other ons. For example, nearly 40 percent of the major demographic and health surveys inmates in Pennsylvania’s state prisons also exclude prisoners, skewing the results come from Philadelphia, which has no state (Pettit and Sykes, 2008: 9). Western’s work prisons in its city limits. For census and challenges claims about the achievements of redistricting purposes, these Philadelphia the 1992–2000 economic expansion, hailed citizens are considered residents of the as the largest peacetime expansion in US his- counties far from their homes where they are tory. If prison and jail inmates were counted, imprisoned. These tend to be predominantly the US unemployment rate for males would white, rural districts that are Republican have been at least 2 percentage points higher strongholds. by the mid-1990s (Western and Beckett, The evidence of political inequities in 1999: 1052), and the true jobless rate for redistricting arising from how the Census young black males in 2000 would have been Bureau counts prisoners is ‘compelling’, 32 percent, not the official 24 percent according to a report by the National Research (Western, 2006: 90). Council of the National Academies (2006: 9). A provocative analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative suggests that several Republican Senate seats in New York State RESISTANCE TO THE would be in jeopardy if prisoners in upstate CARCERAL STATE correctional institutions were counted in their home neighborhoods in New York City The carceral state raises many important (Wagner, 2002: 1–6). A recalibration of New issues about power and resistance. Some York’s prison population would likely put the scholars suggest that a new social movement Republican Party’s decades-old domination may be coalescing around opposition to the in the state Senate at risk. carceral state (Katzenstein, 2005; Gilmore, The current census practice grossly distorts 2007). This embryonic movement raises a demographic and socioeconomic data, lead- question central to the study of politics: how ing to misleading conclusions in vital areas do marginalized and stigmatized groups like economic growth, migration, household organize and effectively assert political income and racial composition (Lotke and power? Wagner, 2004; Wagner, 2004). For example, Mainstream African-American organiza- in the 2000 census, 56 counties nationwide – tions and leaders have been slow to enlist in or 1 in 50 – with declining populations were a battle against the carceral state (Alexander, misleadingly reported to be growing, thanks 2010). Historically, black leaders have had a to the inclusion of their captive populations persistent unease about focusing on criminal (Heyer and Wagner, 2004). Pennsylvania’s justice issues (DuBois, 1970; Curtin, 2000: Union County, which has an archipelago 9–10, ch. 10; Muhammad, 2010). Some of of federal penitentiaries, is 90 percent white, the same factors that prompted African- according to the 2000 census. But without Americans to distance themselves from the its 5000 prisoners, Union would be 97 per- HIV/AIDS crisis in the black community in cent white (Prisoners of the Census, 2006). the 1980s and 1990s (Cohen, 1999, 2010) Mass imprisonment also distorts labor may be causing them to turn a blind eye to market, economic and demographic data. the crisis of blacks and the carceral state Official statistics mask an invisible inequal- today. The reluctance to embrace and publi- ity generated by mass imprisonment. Large cize the plight of the disproportionate number surveys run by the Census Bureau to deter- of incarcerated African-Americans may be mine the poverty rate, unemployment rate the result of fears that this will reflect unfa- and wage levels exclude people who are vorably on blacks as a whole and impede

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222525 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 226 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

black leaders’ efforts to identify with what their stark racial consequences and their they perceive to be the middle-class moral deeper historical origins in the Jim Crow values of the mainstream. For example, some era’s efforts to undo Reconstruction and push civil rights groups were reluctant to use blacks out of the electorate. But as the felon the federal Voting Rights Act to challenge disenfranchisement issue attracted a broader felon disenfranchisement laws ‘for fear of array of supporters, including People for a backlash that might jeopardize the rights the American Way, DEMOS, the AFL-CIO of the more privileged members of the black and the Brennan Center, ‘the discourse community’ (Warren, 2000). Many black surrounding reform de-emphasized race’ legislators and other black leaders initially (Brown-Dean, 2010: 202). The new deracial- were enthusiastic recruits in the war on drugs ized strategy emphasized the importance of and even supported the enormous sentenc- universal suffrage ‘for preserving the legiti- ing disparity between crack and powder macy of the democratic process’ (Brown- cocaine, which disproportionately hurts Dean, 2010: 202). African-Americans (Kennedy, 1997: 370–2; For decades, the NAACP, the country’s Barker, 2009: 149–52). Cohen contends most prominent civil rights organization, that the black media and black elites, includ- was politically somnambulant as the carceral ing Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby and Barack state and the gap between black and white Obama, have contributed to a ‘moral panic’ incarceration rates continued to grow. That based on ‘an exaggerated fear of black youth’ appears to be changing since Benjamin (Cohen, 2010: 39). At the same time, they Jealous became head of the NAACP in have remained relatively silent about the 2008. Jealous has characterized mass incar- enormous structural barriers, including ceration as the leading civil rights issue racism, that ensnare black Americans. This of the 21st century (Serwer, 2009). In early ‘secondary marginalization’ – or public polic- 2011, the NAACP released a major report ing by black elites – denies ‘community rec- on the schools-to-prison pipeline that docu- ognition and resources to those labeled mented how corrections budgets have grown deviant in the black community by indige- at the expense of funding for education. nous organizations, institutions, and leaders’ Shortly thereafter, the NAACP unveiled a and legitimizes the ‘heightened policing and major national billboard campaign to draw criminalization’ of young black Americans attention to the problem of mass incarcera- (Cohen, 2010: 42). tion (NAACP, 2011). At its annual conven- Mainstream African-American leaders and tion in July 2011, the NAACP enacted a groups have sporadically challenged the war historical resolution calling for an end to the on drugs and the carceral state (Clemetson, war on drugs (Smith, 2011). 2004). In 1993–4, the Congressional Black Penal reformers are enlisting not only civil Caucus (CBC) was a major factor in getting rights but also international human rights crime prevention programs included in the laws and norms to challenge the carceral federal crime bill. The CBC also waged a state. The accelerated political and economic valiant but ultimately losing battle to enact integration of Europe over the past couple of the Racial Justice Act, which would have decades has increased pressure on European permitted introducing statistical evidence of countries to be more aware of how their racial discrimination in capital punishment penal policies and prison conditions com- cases. The NAACP, ACLU and some other pare with those of their neighbors. This has civil rights organizations initially were at the helped neutralize some of the growing inter- forefront of the push begun in the mid-1990s nal political pressures to be more punitive in to challenge laws that disenfranchise former the UK, which has one of the highest incar- offenders. At its start, the campaign focused ceration rates in Western Europe. The USA on the discriminatory nature of these laws, is likewise highly vulnerable to unfavorable

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222626 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 227

cross-national comparisons of penal policies The rising number of women behind bars and penal conditions. Through their detailed for minor drug violations or for being the reports on capital punishment, the wide- unwitting or reluctant accomplices to abusive spread use of life sentences, supermax pris- partners has highlighted the persistent prob- ons, abuse of female prisoners, prison rape lems with the drug war, as has the growing and other disturbing conditions in US pris- number of imprisoned mothers with young ons, human rights organizations, such as children (Talvi, 2007; Kruttschnitt, 2010). Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch A number of critics suggest that the women’s and the ACLU, and leading penal reform movement needs to address the problem groups, such as The Sentencing Project, have of violence against women not by strength- been drawing increased national and inter- ening its ties with law enforcement and national attention to how US penal practices victims’ groups but by connecting up with are exceptionally punitive when compared to other progressive reform movements calling other Western countries. for social justice, an expanded welfare state The carceral state has the potential to and a retreat of the carceral state (Harris, reconfigure the politics of feminism and 1987; Snider, 1994: 110; Bumiller, 2008). women’s issues. With more than two million The most significant political challenges people behind bars, the overwhelming major- to the carceral state appear to be occurring ity of them men, millions of women are at the subnational level. Today many states the mothers, daughters, wives, partners and are attempting to slow their incarceration sisters of men entombed in the carceral state. rates, with varied degrees of success. Barker Moreover, since 1995, women have been the (2009) demonstrates how differences in the fastest growing segment of the US prison structure of state governance and in the prac- population (Harrison and Beck, 2006: 4). tice of civic engagement help explain why The enormous expansion of the carceral state California has pursued far more punitive may finally bring about a day of reckoning policies than New York or Washington State. for feminism and women’s groups on the Although many national civil rights organi- issue of law enforcement and the state. Over zations and leaders have been slow to chal- the past decade or so, the chorus of doubts lenge the carceral state, poor neighborhoods about relying on penal solutions to address in urban areas have been ‘hotbeds of mobili- violence against women has grown louder zation’ around criminal justice issues (Miller, across a broad range of feminists, crime 2007: 313). Some urban neighborhoods have experts, academics and social workers. been intensely engaged in developing polic- Concerns have been growing about man- ing and other criminal justice policies at the datory arrest, presumptive arrest and no-drop local level (Skogan, 2006). Local community policies in the case of domestic violence groups in urban areas appear to take a less and about community notification and civil punitive approach to penal matters. They sit- commitment laws for sexual offenders. These uate menaces like criminal violence and the legal remedies do not necessarily reduce illegal drug market within a wider social violence against women and children and context that highlights how racial discrimina- may have contributed to greater state control tion, high employment, inadequate housing of women, especially poor women. They also and health care, and failing schools are all have fostered gross public understandings part of the ‘crime problem’ (Miller, 2007: of the causes of sexual and other violence 311). For a variety of institutional and politi- against women and children and how to pre- cal reasons that analysts are just beginning to vent it (Zorza and Woods, 1994; Minow, excavate, these local groups in high-crime 1998; Coker, 2001: 807; Lombardi, 2002; areas have been persistently locked out of the Sontag, 2002; Miller, 2005; Janus, 2006; crime and punishment debate at the state and Gruber, 2007; Bumiller, 2008; Whittier, 2009). national levels (Miller, 2008).

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222727 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 228 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

African-American and Hispanic women finance, surplus land, surplus labor and sur- have been establishing important grass-roots plus state capacity (2007: 88). and statewide organizations to challenge the Anti-prison activists are using new eco- carceral state on a number of fronts, from nomic and political arguments and forging three-strikes laws to the siting of new pris- new rural-urban coalitions and alliances with ons. Gilmore traces how the organization environmental groups to unhinge the carceral Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (ROC), state (Braz and Gilmore, 2006; Gilmore, 2007). founded in California in the early 1990s, For example, a coalition of family ranchers evolved from being a self-help group ‘into and farmworker families in Farmersville, a pair of political organizations trying to California, successfully fought the construc- build a powerful movement’ to challenge tion of a new prison in their community. what she calls ‘domestic militarism’ (2007: They based their strategy on showing how 239). Mothers ROC ‘critically deploys the prisons do not solve the economic problems ideological power of motherhood to chal- of rural areas but do create new ones as they lenge the legitimacy’ of the carceral state by endanger the water supply, aggravate class emphasizing how each prisoner is someone’s and racial inequalities and raise rates of child (Gilmore, 1999: 27). Mothers ROC and domestic violence (Gilmore, 2007: 177). other reform organizations also stress the devastating impact that incarceration is having on the children and communities that offenders leave behind. As Gilmore poign- THE COMPARATIVE POLITICS antly explains, prisons ‘wear out places by OF PENAL POLICY wearing out people, irrespective of whether they have done time’ (1999: 17). Scholars Mass imprisonment within a democratic and activists are drawing increased attention polity and the hyper-incarceration (Wacquant, to how US penal policies constitute a ‘war on 2008) of certain groups are unprecedented the family’ that leaves the millions of chil- developments. The consolidation of this new dren of imprisoned and formerly imprisoned model in the USA has spurred interest in parents shattered and traumatized (Bernstein, comparative penal policy and raises the ques- 2005; Golden, 2005). tion: Is this country exceptionally vulnerable The political economy of the carceral to get-tough policies, or will other countries state is emerging as another point of attack emulate the USA? for opponents of the carceral state. We are Deep-seated cultural differences have beginning to get a much more sophisticated been a consistent theme in recent scholarship understanding of who benefits economically on US exceptionalism in criminal justice and who does not from the carceral state. policy. Cultural factors singled out include an This work challenges the narrowly econo- abiding mistrust of the government (Zimring mistic view, popular for a long time among et al., 2001; Whitman, 2003; Zimring, 2003), many anti-prison activists, that attributes the a history of vigilantism (Zimring, 2003), an origins of the carceral state to the private enduring attachment to liberal egalitarianism interests that profit from building prisons, (Whitman, 2003) and the impact of centuries running prisons and exploiting prison labor. of white supremacy on American political Gilmore develops a more subtle political development (Kaplan, 2006). Some scholars economy argument to explain the creation of have focused on more recent cultural and a ‘golden gulag’ in California. She singles social changes to explain American excep- out the specific contours of the state’s wrench- tionalism, most notably the arrival of late ing economic and political restructuring modernity in the postwar era and the onset beginning in the 1970s that created surplus of a new ‘culture of control’ (Garland, 2001).

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222828 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 229

Institutional and political factors are not Not surprisingly, conflict-style political incidental to these accounts of American systems (like those in the USA and the UK) exceptionalism in penal policy but they do tend to produce conflict-style political cul- not predominate. tures with lower levels of public trust and The issue of American exceptionalism in lower levels of government legitimacy – penal policy has spurred greater interest in two important contributors to law-and-order comparative work on crime control and penal politics. Other important institutional varia- policy and in how exceptional institutional, bles include the level of party discipline political, and economic factors create excep- and whether the political economy leans tional penal policies (Cavadino and Dignan, more toward neoliberalism, corporatism or 2006; Lacey, 2008; Garland, 2010). In the social democracy. Another key variable introduction to a pathbreaking volume survey- appears to be the varied ways that industrial- ing penal developments in several advanced ized countries have responded to the decline industrialized countries, Tonry (2007) con- of the Fordist model of production and the cedes a role – though a circumscribed one – emergence of a more contingent workforce for specific national characteristics in and a less regulated global market (De Giorgi, explaining variations in punitiveness. But he 2006). resists the contention that transnational forces Another important institutional factor is associated with globalization and with the sharp differences in the organization and economic and social dislocations of late selection of judges and prosecutors. The modernity, including rising existential angst, USA is the only major Western country in individualism and alienation, are the main which judges and prosecutors are either engines propelling more punitive policies. elected or selected according to partisan cri- Most of the contributors to the Tonry teria, making these officials highly suscepti- volume agree that crime patterns generally ble to public opinion and emotions (Tonry, explain little about why some countries 2007). In most civil-law countries, judges are more punitive than others. From the and prosecutors are career civil servants 1960s to the early to-mid 1990s, crime rates ‘who have spent a professional lifetime generally increased in the USA and most absorbing norms of professionalism, politi- other industrialized countries (with some cal nonpartisanship and impartiality’, which fluctuations over this period). But only helps insulate them from ‘public emotion the USA, the Netherlands, the UK and and vigilantism’ in individual cases (Tonry, New Zealand experienced sharp increases 2007: 35). in their incarceration rates (Tonry, 2007), Institutional factors also have acted as a though the US incarceration rate remains in check on law-and-order politics in Canada. a league all its own. Tonry and many of Legislative power over sentencing is the his contributors single out a combination exclusive domain of Canada’s federal gov- of institutional, political, socioeconomic and ernment. Provincial governments, which are cultural factors to explain such wide varia- more susceptible to populist pressures to get tions in punitiveness. tough, have no real legislative authority to Several institutional factors are pivotal. alter criminal laws. Local, grass-roots citi- ‘Conflict’ political systems based on two zens’ groups lack viable structural mecha- dominant parties, first-past-the-post electoral nisms (such as referendum) to directly push systems, and single-member electoral dis- punitive measures, such as three-strikes laws, tricts are more likely to enact harsher meas- and the Canadian government has sharply ures than consensual, multiparty systems limited their influence in public bodies deal- with proportional representation, coalition ing with crime policy (Webster and Doob, governments and greater policy continuity. 2007). The majority of bills passed by

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 222929 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 230 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

Parliament originate with the government, sensationalistic media culture to create incen- not individual legislators. This tends to make tives for politicians and journalists to politi- the government more sensitive to the broader cize events such as the Bulger homicide to financial and other ramifications of criminal score political points and sell newspapers’ justice legislation. It also permits a wide (Green, 2007: 593). These differences in the range of other government departments to organization of the media help explain why weigh in on proposed legislation. Criminal Tony Blair and ‘New’ Labour were so suc- justice policy has remained largely the cessful at exploiting the Bulger case to domain of nonpartisan career civil servants express their unapologetically populist and who soldier on despite shifts in which party tough new stance on penal policy. This is heads the government. Divided responsibili- another example of how US-style punitive- ties between the federal government, which ness has made its greatest inroads in the UK, handles all criminal justice legislation, and where political pressure to talk – and act – the provinces, which administer the justice tough on crime and punishment remains system, ensure that any change in criminal strong despite drops in the crime rate law ‘requires extensive consultation between (Newburn, 2007). the two “partners” ’ (Webster and Doob, An underlying theme of much of the 2007: 340). This is a time-consuming proc- work on comparative penal policy is that ess that reduces the likelihood of the knee- stable incarceration rates and penal policies jerk style of criminal justice policymaking cannot be taken for granted. Even countries that vexes the USA. Furthermore, judges such as Canada, best known for its persistent are selected in a nonpartisan process, which ‘penal blandness,’ are ‘extremely vulnerable insulates the judiciary from public pressures to a burst for the worst’ (Brodeur, 2007: 84; and political interference. The Canadian Johnson, 2007; Webster and Doob, 2007). judiciary has served as an important safety A panoply of historical, cultural and institu- valve, minimizing the impact of especially tional factors have shielded Canada from punitive legislation enacted for blatantly wider punitive forces – thus far. But the political reasons (Brodeur, 2007; Webster country’s decades-old stance of punitive and Doob, 2007). restraint may be in jeopardy due to a series of Differences in the organization of the political scandals that robbed the federal media are also an important institutional government of its moral authority, a succes- factor. All countries experience horrific sen- sion of unstable minority governments and sationalistic crimes. But the mark that head- a dramatic spike in gun-related homicides line-grabbing crimes leave on penal policy in Toronto, the country’s media capital. These varies enormously. In a fascinating essay, developments provided an opening for politi- Green (2007) compares the infamous case cians across the board to adopt ‘get tough’ of Jamie Bulger, the toddler abducted and platforms for electoral gain beginning around killed in 1993 by two 10-year-old boys out- 2005. Confidence in nonpartisan expert opin- side Liverpool, UK, with the 1994 death of ion is eroding, and personal attacks on civil five-year-old Silje Marie Redergard, who servants are on the rise. Canada could go was attacked by three six-year-olds in a the way of the Netherlands and Japan, where suburb of Trondheim, Norway. Bulger’s several somewhat independent events rapidly death propelled English politicians on a law- eroded the protective factors that had made and-order campaign that pushed England in a them two of the most lenient countries in the sharply punitive direction, while Redergard’s world (Downes, 2007; Johnson, 2007; homicide left no lasting mark on Norwegian Webster and Doob, 2007). penal policy. In England, ‘the highly adver- Differences in country-specific institutional, sarial, zero-sum-game-style political culture’ socioeconomic and cultural factors dominate interacted with ‘a highly competitive and explanations for variations in punitiveness.

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223030 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 231

However, transnational factors are not inci- likelihood that political arguments and sym- dental. As Downes pithily remarks, ‘[T]he bolic messages will trump arguments based prison system may be an archipelago, but on principles and professional expertise it is not an island’ (2007: 118). Transnational (Lappi-Seppälä, 2007). factors are exerting contradictory pulls on Despite some new developments that penal policy. On the one hand, the USA has suggest industrialized countries in Europe become ‘an aggressive exporter of its penal and elsewhere may be becoming more ideas and management systems’ as ‘American punitive, the USA remains in a league all its correctional industries trawl the world for own. As Franklin Zimring once remarked, markets, finding ready buyers in England comparing increases in incarceration rates for a twentieth-century version of the prison over the last three decades in Europe to those hulks’ (Downes, 2007: 118). Some contend in the USA is like comparing a haircut to that the growing transnational pressures a beheading (quoted in Downes, 2007: 103). of migration and neoliberalism are likely But it does raise the question, ‘[I]s the United to exert significant upward pressure on the States an outlier or a harbinger of things incarceration rates of other developed coun- to come elsewhere?’ Or, in other words, ‘[I]s tries (De Giorgi, 2006; Wacquant, 2009). a haircut the prelude to a beheading’ (Downes, Others are more optimistic that domestic 2007: 103)? institutions and conditions are capable in many cases of moderating these outside pres- sures so that many developed countries will maintain ‘relatively moderate and modest FUTURE RESEARCH penal systems in the decades to come’ (Lacey, 2008: 167). Interest in examining the political factors The accelerated political and economic that have propelled a country or state to integration of Europe over the past couple of drastically cut its incarceration rate or other- decades has increased pressure on European wise pursue less punitive policies is growing. countries to be more aware of how their The recent analysis of the factors behind penal policies and prison conditions compare a major decarceration in California in the with those of their neighbors. This has helped 1960s when conservative Ronald Reagan neutralize some of the growing internal was governor is a remarkable story (Gartner political pressures to be more punitive in the et al., 2011). So is the account of why UK (Newburn, 2007; Snacken, 2007; Tonry, California repealed its felon disenfranchise- 2007). However, European integration may ment laws in 1974, defying the trend toward be a mixed blessing for penal policy over the greater punitiveness at the ballot box as the long term. It may force get-tough countries nonwhite population of a state increases such as Britain to lighten up. But it may also (Campbell, 2007). push the more lenient ones to toughen up The experience of other industrialized and match some evolving European mean of countries may shed some light on how to punitiveness. Some analysts have been quite dampen the enthusiasm in the USA for critical of multilateral attempts to harmonize putting so many of its people under lock and criminal law. They fear this will result in key and the watchful eye of the state (Roberts stiffer sentences ‘without any real debate as and Gabor, 2004). If the experience of other to the efficacy and justice of such sentences’ countries is any guide, the so-called root (Padfield, 2004: 89, cited in Lappi-Seppälä, causes approach to progressive penal reform, 2007: 286, n. 36). The time-consuming delib- however well intentioned, may be short- erations that have been the hallmark of sighted (Brodeur, 2007: 77). This approach Europe’s more lenient countries, notably in seeks to solve the crime and punish- Scandinavia, are at risk. This increases the ment dilemma by focusing on ameliorating

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223131 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 232 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

structural problems, such as rampant poverty, For all the talk about a more punitive high unemployment, dysfunctional schools, public mood, the public’s anxiety about an abysmal health-care system and entrenched crime is ‘subject to sudden, dramatic shifts, racism. Long-term fixes are problematic unrelated to any objective measure of crime’ not just because they take a long time. As (Frase, 2001: 268). The widespread impres- Brodeur (2007) notes, they are nettlesome sion that public concern about crime sky- because they are harder to sustain from one rocketed in the 1960s with the jump in the change of administration to the next. In the crime rate and the general uneasiness associ- US case, the absence of a respected, expert, ated with the riots and demonstrations of insular, nonpartisan civil service that main- these years is not solidly supported by tains policy continuity despite political shifts public opinion data (Beckett, 1997: 23–5; compounds the problem. The focus on struc- Chambliss, 1999: Table 1.1, 20; Loo and tural problems overshadows the fact that Grimes, 2004). The public certainly ‘accepts, many of the people in US prisons are serving if not prefers’ a range of hard-line policies time for nonviolent offenses, many of which like the death penalty, three-strikes laws, are property or petty drug offenses that would and increased use of incarceration. But sup- not warrant a prison sentence in many other port for these more punitive policies is countries. It also deflects attention away from ‘mushy’, partly because public knowledge of the fact that prisons exacerbate many social criminal justice is so sketchy (Roberts and ills that contribute to crime and poverty and Stalans, 1998: 37–8; Cullen et al., 2000: 1). are unlikely to significantly rehabilitate The public consistently overestimates the anyone. Finland made changing penal policy proportion of violent crime and the recidi- in the short term – not social and economic vism rate (Gest, 2001: 267). Possessing lim- policy over the long term – its top priority as ited knowledge of how the criminal justice it consciously sought in the 1960s to slash its system actually works, people in the USA incarceration rate. It reduced its prison popu- and elsewhere generally believe the system lation significantly over a relatively short is more forgiving of offenders than it really is period of time without a sustained attack on (Roberts, 1997: 250–5; Roberts and Stalans, deeper structural problems (Brodeur, 2007: 1998: 50; Roberts et al., 2003). Overly sim- 75; Lappi-Seppälä, 2007: 234). Germany did plistic public opinion surveys reinforce the the same in the 1980s (Graham, 1990). ‘assumption of an unflinching punitive “law Many other critical areas remain to be and order” tilt of US public opinion on explored. The need is great for more sophis- crime’ and mask ‘large and recurrent’ differ- ticated studies of public opinion on a range ences between the views of blacks and whites of criminal justice issues and also on the on the criminal justice system (Bobo and impact of public opinion on criminal justice Johnson, 2004; see also Unnever and Cullen, policy (Zimring and Johnson, 2006). A 2010). number of public opinion surveys offer com- Moreover, policymaking elites tend to pelling evidence that public attitudes in the misperceive public opinion on crime, view- USA have hardened on criminal justice mat- ing the public as more punitive and obsessed ters even though they have liberalized on a with its own safety than is in fact the case range of other issues, such as sexual behav- (Gottfredson and Taylor, 1987). Some of the ior, abortion and civil liberties (Sharp, 1999: more sophisticated surveys and focus groups 53, 52, Figs 2–3; Gaubatz, 1995). Although reveal a potentially more forgiving public public attitudes about crime and criminals supportive of rehabilitation but increasingly appear to have hardened, it is misleading to opposed to spending more on prisons (Doob, portray the public as overwhelmingly puni- 1995: 210, fn 23; Roberts, 1997: 250–4; tive. The role of public opinion in penal Roberts and Stalans, 1998; Cullen et al., policy is extremely complex. 2000: 28–33; Justice Policy Institute, 2001;

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223232 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 233

Hart Research Associates, 2002; Cohen et American Society of Criminology, ‘[P]olitics al., 2006). is at the heart of American criminology’ Another key area for analysts to investi- (1978: 3). Yet the discipline of political sci- gate is whether a radically new penal model ence is just beginning to recognize crime and is taking root in the USA and, if so, what punishment as a critical area in the study of are the political implications of this develop- politics in the USA and elsewhere, and that ment. The breathtaking and unprecedented crime control strategies are profoundly polit- increase in the number of people under state ical because they both reflect and direct the supervision in the USA has overshadowed a distribution of power in society (Scheingold, ‘profound qualitative transformation’ in penal 1998: 857). Alarmed by the pernicious policy over the past two to three decades consequences of the hyper-politicization of (McLennan, 2001: 408). Important changes criminal justice policymaking since the include: the growing exploitation of prison 1970s, criminologists generally have recoiled labor; the proliferation of private prisons and from paying serious attention to the how the the privatization of food, medical, and other political context influences all aspects of prison services; the widespread use of para- crime and punishment (Loader and Sparks, military technologies and techniques in penal 2011). Many criminologists have sought and police operations; the blurring of the refuge in producing state-of-the-art, ostensi- distinction between police and military bly apolitical, evidence-based research cen- forces; the escalating number of incarcerated tered largely on how to reduce crime or on women; and the proliferation of supermax how to help government agencies or other cells and other degrading and inhumane groups reduce crime. But such a ‘narrowly conditions of confinement, like boot camps, instrumental focus appears to forget that in chain gangs, and prison rodeos (Kraska, a liberal democracy it matters not only that 2001; McLennan, 2001; Rhodes, 2004; crime is prevented and detected, but also Sudbury, 2005; Gómez, 2006; Abramsky, how that happens’ (Loader and Sparks, 2011; 2007). More work needs to be done on 107, original emphasis). Loader and Sparks whether these changes herald the ascent of rightfully beseech criminologists to recog- a new penal model. McLennan (2001) and nize that all aspects of crime and punish- others contend that the new penal model ment are inherently political for they lie at is not exclusively a domestic phenomenon the ‘heart of matters of state, authority, and but is also a product of important transna- sovereignty’ and are central to how we think tional forces, including globalization, the about what constitutes a good and fair ‘war on terror,’ growing militarization and society (2011: 60, 108). the ascendancy of the neoliberal political and economic model (McLennan, 2001: 416; Strange, 2006; Gilmore, 2007; Wacquant, 2009; Bosworth, 2010). NOTES

1 For a skeptical view of whether the economic crisis marks the beginning of the end of mass incar- CONCLUSION ceration, see Gottschalk (2011). 2 Ironically, some of the very historical and institu- tional factors that made the US women’s movement For all the recent advances in our understand- relatively more successful in gaining public accept- ing of the contemporary politics of crime ance and achieving its goals for women (Gelb, 1987) and punishment, this remains an emerging were important building blocks for the carceral state that emerged simultaneously in the 1970s. Several field. Almost four decades have passed since key institutional variables include: the greater perme- David Bazelon, the chief judge of the US ability of the US Department of Justice to outside Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, told the political forces compared to, for example, the Home

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223333 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 234 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

Office in Britain; the relative weakness of the welfare Beckett, Katherine and Herbert, Steve (2009) Banished: state in the USA; the greater presence of diverse The New Social Control in Urban America. New mass membership organizations like the National York: Oxford University Press. Organization for Women (NOW); the expansive role Beckett, Katherine and Western, Bruce (2001) of the courts in the USA; and the decentralized and ‘Governing social marginality: welfare, incarceration, fragmented nature of the US political system and the transformation of state policy’, Punishment (Gottschalk, 2006: chs 5 and 6). 3 Campbell (2011) attributes the low level of civic & Society, 3 (1): 43–59. involvement to several institutional factors, including Bernstein, Nell (2005) All Alone in the World: Children Texas’s frequent elections, its off-year gubernatorial of the Incarcerated. New York: The New Press. contests, numerous constitutional amendments Blackmon, Douglas (2008) Slavery by Another Name: related to trivial aspects of government, and a deep- The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the seated patriarchal political culture. Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday. 4 An updated version of the time series is available Bobo, Lawrence and Johnson, Devon (2004) ‘A taste from the authors at http://elections.gmu.edu/Voter_ for punishment: black and white Americans’ Views Turnout_2004.htm on the death penalty and the war on drugs’, Du Bois 5 In one county in Georgia about 70 percent of Review, 1: 151–80. the African-American men are ineligible for jury serv- ice due to a felony conviction (Wheelock, 2006, in Bobo, Lawrence and Thompson, Victor (2006) ‘Unfair Wheelock and Uggen, 2008: 278). by design: the war on drugs, race, and the legitimacy 6 On how the proliferation of banishment of the criminal justice system’, Social Research, 73 orders, which often are invoked against people (2): 445–72. who have committed trivial infractions, are creating Bohrman, Rebecca and Murakawa, Naomi (2005) their own special kind of legal and civil purgatory, ‘Remaking big government: immigration and see Beckett and Herbert (2009). On the ‘escalating crime control in the United States’, in Julia Sudbury strategies of surveillance and containment’ of sex (ed.), Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the offenders, see Simon and Leon (2008) and Janus Prison-Industrial Complex. New York: Routledge. (2006). pp. 109–26. Bonczar, Thomas (2003) Prevalence of Imprisonment in the US Population, 1974–2001. US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. REFERENCES Bosworth, Mary (2010) Explaining US Imprisonment. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Abramsky, Sasha (2007) American Furies: Crime, Braz, Rose and Gilmore, Craig (2006) ‘Joining forces: Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass prisons and environmental justice in recent California Imprisonment. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. organizing’, Radical History Review, 96: 95–111. Alexander, Michelle (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Brodeur, Jean-Paul (2007) ‘Comparative penology in Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New perspective’, in Michael Tonry (ed.), Crime, Punish- York: The New Press. ment, and Politics in a Comparative Perspective— Alix, Ernest (1978) Ransom Kidnapping in America, Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 36. 1874–1974: The Creation of a Capital Crime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 49–91. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois Brown-Dean, Khalilah (2004) ‘One lens, multiple University Press. views: felon disenfranchisement laws and American Ayers, Edward (1984) Vengeance and Justice: Crime political inequality’. PhD dissertation, Ohio State and Punishment in the 19th-Century American University. South. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown-Dean, Khalilah (2010) ‘Once convicted, forever Barker, Vanessa (2009) The Politics of Imprisonment: doomed: race, ex-felon disenfranchisement, and How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way fractured citizenship’. Unpublished manuscript. America Punishes Offenders. New York: Oxford Bumiller, Kristin (2008) In an Abusive State: How University Press. Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Bazelon, David (1978) ‘The hidden politics of criminol- against Domestic Violence. Durham, NC: Duke ogy’, Federal Probation, 42: 3–9. University Press. Beckett, Katherine (1997) Making Crime Pay: Law and Burch, Traci (2007) ‘Punishment and participation: how Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: criminal convictions threaten American democracy’. Oxford University Press. PhD dissertation, Harvard University.

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223434 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 235

Burch, Traci (2008) ‘Did disenfranchisement laws Cummings, Homer and McFarland, Carl (1937) Federal help elect President Bush? a closer look at Justice: Chapters in the History of Justice and the the characteristics and preferences of Florida’s Federal Executive. New York: The Macmillan ex-felons.’ Northwestern University School of Company. Law, Law and Political Economy Colloquium, Curtin, Mary (2000) Black Prisoners and Their World, November 3. Alabama, 1865–1900. Charlottesville, VA: University Burton-Rose, Daniel Pens, Dan and Wright, Paul (eds) of Virginia Press. (1998) The Celling of America: An Inside Look at Davey, Joseph Dillon (1998) The Politics of Prison the US Prison Industry. Monroe, ME: Common Expansion: Winning Elections By Waging War on Courage Press. Crime. Westport, CT: Praeger. Campbell, Michael (2007) ‘Criminal disenfranchise- De Giorgi, Alessandro (2006) Re-Thinking the Political ment reform in California: a deviant case study’, Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on Post- Punishment & Society, 9 (2): 177–99. Fordism and Penal Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Campbell, Michael (2011) ‘Politics, prisons, and law DiIulio John, Jr (1997) ‘Are voters fools? Crime, public enforcement: an examination of “Law and Order” opinion, and representative democracy’, Corrections politics in Texas’, Law & Society Review, 45(3): Management, 1: 1–5. 631–65. Domanick, Joe (2004) Cruel Justice: Three Strikes Caplow, Theodore and Simon, Jonathan (1999) and the Politics of Crime in America’s Golden State. ‘Understanding prison policy and population Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. trends’, in Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia (eds), Doob, Anthony (1995) ‘The United States sentencing Prisons – Crime and Justice: A Review of Research. commission guidelines: if you don’t know where Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 63–120. you are going, you might not get there’, in Chris Carleton, Mark T. (1971) Politics and Punishment: The Clarkson and Rod Morgan (eds), The Politics of History of the Louisiana Penal System. Baton Rouge, Sentencing Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LO: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 226–33. Cavadino, Michael and Dignan, James (2006) Penal Dow, Mark (2004) American Gulag: Inside US Systems: A Comparative Approach, 4th edn. London: Immigration Prisons. Berkeley, CA: University of SAGE Publications. California Press. Chambliss, William (1999) Power, Politics, and Crime. Downes, David (2007) ‘Visions of penal control in the Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Netherlands’, in Michael Tonry (ed.), Crime, Punish- Christianson, Scott (1998) With Liberty For Some: 500 ment, and Politics in a Comparative Perspective— Years of Imprisonment in America. Boston, MA: Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 36. Northeastern University Press. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 93–125. Clemetson, Lynette (2004) ‘NAACP Legal Defense Fund Downes, David and Hansen, Kirstine (2006) ‘Welfare Chief Retires’. New York Times, January: A10. and punishment in comparative context’, in Sarah Cohen, Cathy (1999) The Boundaries of Blackness: Armstrong and Lesley McAra (eds), Perspectives on AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago: Punishment: The Contours of Control. Oxford: Oxford University of Chicago Press. University Press. pp. 33–54. Cohen, Cathy (2010) Democracy Remixed: Black Youth DuBois, W.E.B. (1970) ‘Courts and jails’, in Walter and the Future of American Politics. New York: Wilson (ed.), The Selected Writings of W.E.B. DuBois. Oxford University Press. New York: Signet Classics. pp. 126–7. Cohen, Mark, Rust, Roland and Steen, Sara (2006) Dumm, Thomas (1987) Democracy and Punishment: ‘Prevention, crime control or cash? Public prefer- Disciplinary Origins of the United States. Madison, ences towards criminal justice spending priorities’, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Justice Quarterly, 23: 317–35. Dyer, Joel (2000) The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: Coker, Donna (2001) ‘Crime control and feminist law How America Profits from Crime. Boulder, CO: reform in domestic violence law: a critical review’, Westview. Buffalo Criminal Law Review, 4: 801–60. Edgerton, Keith (2004) Montana Justice: Power, Criminology & Public Policy (2011) ‘Special issue on Punishment, and the Penitentiary. Seattle, WA: mass incarceration’, 10 (3). University of Washington Press. Cullen, Francis, Fisher, Bonnie and Applegate, Brandon Edsall, Thomas Byrne and Edsall, Mary (1991) Chain (2000) ‘Public opinion about punishment and Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on corrections’, Crime and Justice, 27: 1–79. American Politics. New York: Norton.

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223535 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 236 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

Ewald, Alec (2002) ‘“Civil Death”: the ideological para- Goffman, Alice (2009) ‘On the run: wanted men in a dox of criminal disenfranchisement law in the United Philadelphia ghetto’, American Sociological Review, States’, Wisconsin Law Review, 5: 1045–138. 74 (June): 339–57. Fabelo, Tony (2010) ‘Texas justice reinvestment: be Golden, Renny (2005) War on the Family: Mothers more like Texas?’, Justice Research and Policy, in Prison and the Families They Leave Behind. 12(1): 113–31. New York: Routledge. Fierce, Mildred (1994) Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Gómez, Alan (2006) ‘Resisting living death at Marion Southern Convict Lease System, 1865–1933. New federal penitentiary, 1972’, Radical History Review, York: Africana Studies Research Center, Brooklyn 96: 58–86. College, CUNY. Goodnough, Amy (2004) ‘Disenfranchised Florida Flamm, Michael (2005) Law and Order: Street Crime, felons struggle to regain their rights’, New York Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the Times, 28 March: 1. 1960s. New York: Columbia University Press. Gordon, Diana (1994) The Return of the Dangerous Frase, Richard (2001) ‘Comparative perspectives on Classes: Drug Prohibition and Policy Politics. New sentencing and research’, in Michael Tonry and York: W.W. Norton & Co. Richard S. Frase (eds), Sentencing and Sanctions in Gorman, Anna (2009) ‘Latinos make up a growing bloc Western Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. of federal offenders’, Los Angeles Times, 19 February: pp. 259–92. A10. Garland, David (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime Gottfredson, Stephen and Taylor, Ralph (1987) and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: ‘Attitudes of correctional policymakers and the University of Chicago Press. public’, in Stephen D. Gottfredson and Sean Garland, David (2010) Peculiar Institution: America’s McConville (eds), America’s Correctional Crisis: Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Cambridge, Prison Populations and Public Policy. New York: MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Greenwood Press. pp. 57–75. Gartner, Rosemary, Doob, Anthony and Zimring, Gottschalk, Marie (2006) The Prison and the Gallows: Franklin (2011) ‘The past as prologue? Decarceration The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. in California then and now’, Criminology & Public Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Policy, 10 (2): 291–325. Gottschalk, Marie (2007) ‘Prisoners of the Census Gaubatz, Kathlyn Taylor (1995) Crime in the Public Bureau’, LA Times, 19 February: A9. Mind. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Gottschalk, Marie (2011) ‘The great recession and Press. the great confinement: the economic crisis and Gelb, Joyce (1987) ‘Social movement “success”: a the future of penal reform’, in Richard Rosenfeld, comparative analysis of feminism in the United Kenna Quinet, and Crystal Garcia (eds), Contemporary States and United Kingdom’, in Mary Fainsod Issues in Criminological Theory and Research: The Katzenstein, Carol McClung Mueller (eds), The Role of Social Institutions, 2nd edn. Belmont, CA: Women’s Movements of the United States and Wadsworth/Cengage. pp. 343–70. Western Europe. Philadelphia: Temple University Graham, John (1990) ‘Decarceration in the federal Press. pp. 267–89. republic of Germany: how practitioners are succeed- Gest, Ted (2001) Crime & Politics: Big Government’s ing where policy-makers failed’, British Journal of Erratic Campaign for Law and Order. Oxford: Oxford Criminology, 30 (3): 150–70. University Press. Green, David (2007) ‘Comparing penal cultures: Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (1999) ‘You have dislodged a child-on-child homicide in England and Norway’, boulder: mothers and prisoners in the post Keynesian in Michael Tonry (ed.), Crime, Punishment, and Californian landscape’, Transforming Anthropology, Politics in a Comparative Perspective – Crime and 8: 12–38. Justice: A Review of Research 36. Chicago: University Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (2007) The Golden Gulag: of Chicago Press. pp. 591–643. Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing Greenberg, David and West, Valerie (2001) ‘State California. Berkeley, CA: University of California prison populations and their growth, 1971–1991’, Press. Criminology, 39 (3): 615–53. Glaze, Lauren, Bonczar, Thomas and Zhang, Fan Gruber, Aya (2007) ‘The feminist war on crime’, Iowa (2010) ‘Probation and parole in the United States, Law Review, 92 (March): 741–833. 2009’, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, Hallinan, Joseph (2001) Going Up the River: Travels in December. a Prison Nation. New York: Random House.

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223636 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 237

Harris, M. Kay (1987) ‘Moving into the new millen- punishment: the contradictions of American capital nium: toward a feminist vision of justice’, Prison punishment’, Law & Social Inquiry, 31 (Winter): Journal, 67: 27–38. 149–75. Harrison, Paige and Beck, Allen (2006) ‘Prisoners Katzenstein, Mary Fainsod (2005) ‘Rights without in 2005’, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, rev. citizenship: activist politics and prison reform in 18 January 2007. the United States’, in David Meyer, Valerie Jenness Hart, P.D. Research Associates (2002) Changing Public and Helen Ingram (eds), Routing the Opposition: Attitudes Toward the Criminal Justice System. New Social Movements, Public Policy, and Democracy. York: The Open Society Institute. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hawkins, Darnell and Hardy, Kenneth A. (1989) ‘Black- pp. 236–58. white imprisonment rates: a state-by-state analysis’, Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy (2002) From Noose to Social Justice, 16 (4): 75–94. Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal Heyer, Rose and Wagner, Peter (2004) ‘Too big to State. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ignore: how counting people in prisons distorted 2000 Kennedy, Randall (1997) Race, Crime, and the Law. census’, April. Available at: www.prisonersofthecen- New York: Pantheon. sus.org/toobig/ (accessed 5 May 2011). Kolodner, Meredith (2006) ‘Private prisons expect a Hindus, Michael (1980) Prison and Plantation: Crime, boom: immigration enforcement to benefit detention Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South companies’, New York Times, 19 July: C1. Carolina, 1767–1978. Chapel Hill, NC: University of Kraska, Peter (ed.) (2001) Militarizing the American North Carolina Press. Criminal Justice System: The Changing Role of the Hirsch, Adam (1992) The Rise of the Penitentiary: Armed Forces and the Police. Boston, MA: Prisons and Punishment in Early America. New Northeastern University Press. Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kruttschnitt, Candace (2010) ‘The paradox of women’s Hochschild, Jennifer (1995) Facing Up to the American imprisonment’, Daedalus, Summer: 32–42. Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. Lacey, Nicola (2008) The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Demo- Hull, Elizabeth (2006) The Disenfranchisement of cracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ex-Felons. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Lappi-Seppälä, Tapio (2007) ‘Penal policy in Press. Scandinavia’, in Michael Tonry (ed.), Crime, Punish- Jacobs, David and Helms, Ronald (1996) ‘Toward a ment, and Politics in a Comparative Perspective – political model of incarceration: a time-series exami- Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 36. nation of multiple explanations for prison admission Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 217–95. rates’, American Journal of Sociology, 102 (6): Lichtenstein, Alex (1996) Twice the Work of Free 322–57. Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the Jacobson, Michael (2005) Downsizing Prisons: How to New South. London: Verso. Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration. New Loader, Ian and Sparks, Richard (2011) Public Crimino- York: New York University Press. logy? London and New York: Routledge. Janus, Eric (2006) Failure to Protect: America’s Sexual Lombardi, Chris (2002) ‘Justice for battered women’, Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State. The Nation, 15 July: 24–7. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Loo, Dennis and Grimes, Ruth (2004) ‘Polls, politics, Johnson, David (2007) ‘Crime and punishment in con- and crime: the “Law and Order” issue of the 1960s’, temporary Japan’, in Michael Tonry (ed.), Crime, Pun- Western Criminology Review, 5 (1): 50–67. ishment, and Politics in a Comparative Perspective – Lotke, Eric and Wagner, Peter (2004) ‘Prisoners of the Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 36. census: electoral and financial consequences of Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 371–423. counting prisoners where they go, not where they Justice Policy Institute (2001) Cutting Correctly: New come from’, Pace Law Review, 24: 587–608. Prison Policies for Times of Fiscal Crisis. Washington, Lynch, Mona (2010) Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the DC: Justice Policy Institute. Transformation of American Punishment. Stanford, Kalt, Brian (2003) ‘The exclusion of felons from jury CA: Stanford University Press. service’, American University Law Review, 53 (1): Lyons, William and Drew, Julie (2006) Punishing 65–189. Schools: Fear and Citizenship in American Kaplan, Paul (2006) ‘American exceptionalism Education. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan and racialized inequality in American capital Press.

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223737 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 238 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

Mancini, Matthew (1996) One Dies, Get Another: Incarcerate, Under Educate. Baltimore, MD: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928. NAACP. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. National Research Council, Panel on Residence Rules in Manza, Jeff and Uggen, Christopher (2006) Locked the Decennial Census (2006) ‘Once, only once, and Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American in the right place: residence rules in the decennial Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. census’. Available at: http://newton.nap.edu/exec- Masur, Louis (1989) Rites of Execution: Capital summ_pdf/11727 (accessed September 2006). Punishment and the Transformation of American Newburn, Tim (2007) ‘“Tough on Crime”: penal Culture, 1776–1865. New York: Oxford University policy in England and Wales’, in Michael Tonry Press. (ed.), Crime, Punishment, and Politics in a Compara- McBride, Keally (2007) Punishment and Political Order. tive Perspective – Crime and Justice: A Review of Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Research 36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McDonald, Michael and Popkin, Samuel (2001) ‘The pp. 425–70. myth of the vanishing voter’, American Political O’Reilly, Kenneth (1982) ‘A new deal for the FBI: the Science Review, 95: 963–74. Roosevelt administration, crime control, and national McLennan, Rebecca (2001) ‘The new penal state: glo- security’, Journal of American History, 69: 638–58. balization, history, and American criminal justice, c. Oshinsky, David (1996) ‘Worse Than Slavery’: Parchman 2000’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2: 407–19. Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: McLennan, Rebecca (2008) The Crisis of Imprisonment: The Free Press. Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Padfield, Nicola (2004) ‘Harmonising of sentencing: Penal State, 1818–1938. New York: Cambridge will it encourage a principled approach?’, in Kauko University Press. Aromaa and Sami Nevala (eds), Crime and Crime Meranze, Michael (1996) Laboratories of Virtue: Control in an Integrated Europe. Helsinki: Heuni. Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in pp. 85–91. Philadelphia, 1760–1835. Chapel Hill, NC: University Page, Joshua (2011a) ‘Fear of change: prison officer of North Carolina Press. unions and the perpetuation of the penal status Miller, Lisa (2007) ‘The representational bias of federal- quo’, Criminology & Public Policy, 10 (3): 735–70. ism: scope and bias in the political process revisited’, Page, Joshua (2011b) The Toughest Beat: Politics, Perspectives on Politics, 5: 305–21. Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in Miller, Lisa (2008) The Perils of Federalism: Race, California. New York: Oxford University Press. Poverty and the Politics of Crime Control. New York: Pager, Devah (2003) ‘The mark of a criminal record’, Oxford University Press. American Journal of Sociology, 108: 937–75. Miller, Susan (2005) Victims as Offenders: The Paradox Pager, Devah (2007) Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding of Women’s Violence in Relationships. New Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. University of Chicago Press. Minow, Martha (1998) ‘Between vengeance and for- Parenti, Christian (1999) Lockdown America: Police giveness: feminist response to violent injustice’, and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. London: Verso. New England Law Review, 32: 967–81. Pattillo, Mary, Weiman, David and Western, Bruce Morone, James (2003) Hellfire Nation: The Politics (eds) (2004) Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Sin in American History. New Haven, CT: Yale of Mass Incarceration. New York: Russell Sage University Press. Foundation. Muhammad, Khalil Gibran (2010) The Condemnation Perkinson, Robert (2010) Texas Tough: The Rise of of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of America’s Prison Empire. New York: Metropolitan Modern America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Books. Press. Pestritto, Ronald J. (2000) Founding the Criminal Law: Murakawa, Naomi (2005) ‘Electing to punish: con- Punishment and Political Thought in the Origins of gress, race, and the American criminal justice state’. America. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University PhD dissertation, Yale University. Press. Myers, Martha (1998) Race, Labor and Punishment in Peterson, Ruth and Krivo, Lauren (2010) Divergent the New South. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crime and the Racial- Press. Spatial Divide. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. National Association for the Advancement of Colored Pettit, Becky and Sykes, Bryan (2008) ‘The demo- People (NAACP) (2011) Misplaced Priorities: Over graphic implications of the prison boom: evidence of

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223838 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 239

a “third demographic transition”?’, unpublished Sabol, William, West, Heather and Cooper, Matthew manuscript. (2009) ‘Prisoners in 2008’, Bureau of Justice Pettus, Katherine (2005) Felony Disenfranchisement in Statistics Bulletin, December. [Revised edition pub- America: Historical Origins, Institutional Racism, and lished June 30, 2010] Modern Consequences. New York: LFB Scholarly Sarabi, Brigette and Bender, Edwin (2000) The Prison Publishing. Payoff: The Role of Politics and Private Prisons in the Pew Center on the States (2009) One in 31: Behind Incarceration Boom. Portland, OR: Western States Bars in America 2008. Washington, DC: Pew Center Center and Western Prison Project. on the States. Sarat, Austin (ed.) (1999) The Killing State: Capital Pew Center on the States (2010) Prison Count 2010. Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture. New York: Washington, DC: Pew Center on the States. Oxford University Press. Pranis, Kevin (2007) ‘Doing borrowed time: the high Sarat, Austin (2001) When the State Kills: Capital cost of backdoor prison finance’, in Tara Herivel and Punishment and the American Condition. Princeton, Paul Wright (eds), Prison Profiteers: Who Makes NJ: Princeton University Press. Money from Mass Incarceration. New York: The New Scheingold, Stuart (1998) ‘Constructing the new Press. pp. 36–51. political criminology: power, authority, and the post- Prisoners of the Census (2006) Too big to ignore liberal state’, Law and Social Inquiry, 23: 857–95. interactive tables: Union County. Available at: http:// Schneider, Anne Larason (2006) ‘An integration of path www.prisonersofthecensus.org/toobig/countydetail. dependence, punctuated equilibrium and policy php?geo_id=05000US42119 (accessed 26 March, design approaches’, Political Research Quarterly, 59: 2012). 457–70. Provine, Doris (2007) Unequal Under Law: Race in the Schoenfeld, Heather (2009) ‘The politics of prison War on Drugs. Chicago: University of Chicago growth: from chain gangs to work release centers Press. and supermax prisons, Florida, 1955–2000’. PhD Rhodes, Lorna (2004) Total Confinement: Madness and dissertation, Northwestern University. Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley, Serwer, Adam (2009) ‘The other black president: CA: University of California Press. the NAACP confronts a new political – and racial – Roberts, Dorothy (2003/2004) ‘The social and moral era’, The American Prospect, 25 February. http:// cost of mass incarceration in African-American com- prospect.org/article/other-black-president (accessed munities’, Stanford Law Review, 56: 1271–305. 26 March, 2012). Roberts, Julian (1997) ‘American attitudes about Shapiro, Karen (1998) A New South Rebellion: The punishment: myth and reality’, in Michael Tonry Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee (ed.), Sentencing Reform in Overcrowded Times: Coalfields, 1871–1896. Chapel Hill, NC: University A Comparative Perspective. New York: Oxford of North Carolina Press. University Press. pp. 250–55. Sharp, Elaine (1999) The Sometime Connection: Roberts, Julian and Gabor, Thomas (2004) ‘Living in Public Opinion and Social Policy. Albany: S.U.N.Y. the shadow of the prison: lessons from the Canadian Press. experience in decarceration’, British Journal of Simon, Jonathan (2007) Governing Through Crime: Criminology, 44: 92–112. How the War on Crime Transformed American Roberts, Julian and Stalans, Loretta (1998) ‘Crime, Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. New criminal justice, and public opinion’, in Michael York: Oxford University Press. Tonry (ed.), The Handbook of Crime and Punishment. Simon, Jonathan and Leon, Chrysanthi (2008) Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 31–57. ‘The third wave: American sex offender policies Roberts, Julian, Stalans, Loretta, Indermauer, David, since the 1990s’, in Shlomo Giora Shoham, Ori Beck and Hough, Mike (2003) Penal Populism and Public and Martin Kett (eds), The International Handbook Opinion: Lessons from Five Countries. Oxford: Oxford of Penology and Criminal Justice. Boca Raton, FL: University Press. CRC Press. pp. 733–54. Rothman, David (1990) The Discovery of the Asylum: Skogan, Wesley (2006) Police and Community in Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, rev. Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities. New York: Oxford ed. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. University Press. Ruth, Henry, and Reitz, Kevin (2003) The Challenge of Smith, P. (2011) ‘NAACP calls for the end to the war on Crime: Rethinking Our Response. Cambridge, MA: drugs’. Available at: http://stopthedrugwar.org/ Harvard University Press. print/28244 (accessed 29 July 2011).

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 223939 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM 240 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY

Snacken, Sonja (2007) ‘Penal policy and practice in Wacquant, Loïc (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Belgium’, in Michael Tonry (ed), Crime, Punishment, Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, and Politics in a Comparative Perspective – Crime NC: Duke University Press. and Justice: A Review of Research 36. Chicago: Wagner, Peter (2002) ‘Importing constituents: prison- University of Chicago Press. pp. 127–215. ers and political clout in New York’, Prison Legal Snider, Laureen (1994) ‘Criminalization: panacea for News, 13 (10): 1–6. men who assault women but anathema for corpo- Wagner, Peter (2004) ‘Prison expansion made 56 rate criminals’, in Dawn H. Currie and Brian D. counties with declining populations appear to be MacLean (eds), Social Inequality, Social Justice. growing in census 2000’. Available at: http://www. Vancouver: Collective Press. pp. 101–24. prisonersofthecensus.org/news/fact-26–4-2004. Sontag, Deborah (2002) ‘Fierce entanglements’, New html (accessed 23 May, 2008). York Times Magazine, 17 November: 52. Walker, Donald (1988) Penology for Profit: A History Stark, Evan (2004) ‘Insults, injury, and injustice’, Violence of the Texas Prison System, 1867–1912. College Against Women, 10: 1302–30. Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Strange, Carolyn (2006) ‘Pain and death: transnational Warren, Dorian (2000) ‘The intersection between perspective’, Radical History Review, 96: 137–50. voting rights and criminal justice: the national black Street, Paul (2002) The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, organizational response to felon disenfranchise- Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the ment’, unpublished paper. Nation. Chicago: Chicago Urban League, Department Weaver, Vesla (2006) ‘Dark prison: race, rights, and the of Research and Planning. politics of punishment’, paper presented at Annual Sudbury, Julia (ed.) (2005) Global Lockdown: Race, Meeting of the American Political Science Associa- Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex. New tion, Philadelphia. 31 Aug–3 Sept. York: Routledge. Weaver, Vesla (2007) ‘Frontlash: race and the develop- Sutton, John (2004) ‘The political economy of imprison- ment of punitive crime policy’, Studies in American ment in affluent Western democracies, 1960–1990’, Political Development, 21: 230–65. American Sociological Review, 69 (2): 170–89. Weaver, Vesla and Lerman, Amy (2010) ‘Political con- Talvi, Silja (2007) Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of sequences of the carceral state’, American Political Women in the US Prison System. Emeryville, CA: Seal Science Review, 104 (4): 817–33. Press. Webb, Jim (2009) ‘Why we must fix our prisons’, Tonry, Michael (1995) Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and Parade, 26 March. Available at: http://www.parade. Punishment in America. New York: Oxford University com/news/2009/03/why-we-must-fix-our-prisons. Press. html (accessed 26 March, 2012). Tonry, Michael (2007) ‘Determinants of penal policy’, Webster, Cheryl Marie and Doob, Anthony (2007) in Michael Tonry (ed.), Crime, Punishment, and ‘Punitive trends and stable imprisonment rates Politics in a Comparative Perspective – Crime and in Canada’, in Michael Tonry (ed.), Crime, Justice: A Review of Research 36. Chicago: University Punishment, and Politics in a Comparative of Chicago Press. pp. 1–48. Perspective – Crime and Justice: A Review of Tonry, Michael (2011) Punishing Race: A Continuing Research 36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. American Dilemma. New York: Oxford University pp. 297–369. Press. West, Heather and Sabol, William (2009) ‘Prison Uggen, Christopher, Manza, Jeff and Thompson, inmates at midyear 2008 – statistical Melissa (2006) ‘Citizenship, democracy, and the tables’, Washington, DC: US Department of civic reintegration of criminal offenders’, The Annals Justice, Office of Justice Programs. March. Rev. of the American Academy of Political & Social 8 April. Sciences, 605: 281–310. Western, Bruce (2006) Punishment and Inequality in Unnever, James and Cullen, Francis (2010) ‘The social America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. sources of Americans’ punitiveness: a test of three Western, Bruce and Beckett, Katherine (1999) ‘How competing models’, Criminology, 48.1: 99–129. unregulated is the U.S. labor market? the penal Wacquant, Loïc (2000) ‘The new “peculiar institution”: system as a labor market institution’, American on the prison as surrogate ghetto’, Theoretical Journal of Sociology, 104: 1030–60. Criminology, 4 (3): 377–89. Wheelock, Darren (2006) ‘A jury of “peers”: felon jury Wacquant, Loïc (2008) ‘Forum’, in Glenn C. Loury (ed.), exclusion, racial threat, and racial inequality in Race, Incarceration, and American Values Cambridge: United States criminal courts’. PhD dissertation, MIT Press. pp. 57–72. University of Minnesota.

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 224040 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM THE CARCERAL STATE AND THE POLITICS OF PUNISHMENT 241

Wheelock, Darren and Uggen, Christopher (2008) Zimring, Franklin, Hawkins, Gordon and Kamin, Sam ‘Punishment, crime, and poverty’, in Ann Chih Lin (2001) Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and David R. Harris (eds), The Colors of Poverty: and You’re Out in California. Oxford: Oxford Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist. New York: University Press. Russell Sage Foundation. pp. 261–92. Zimring, Franklin and Johnson, David (2006) ‘Public Whitman, James (2003) Harsh Justice: Criminal opinion and the governance of punishment in demo- Punishment and the Widening Divide between cratic political systems’, Annals of the American America and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Academy of Political and Social Science, 605 (May): Whittier, Nancy (2009) The Politics of Child Sexual 266–80. Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State. Zorza, Joan and Woods, Laurie (1994) Analysis New York: Oxford University Press. and Policy Implications of the New Domestic Wilson, James Q. (1975). Thinking About Crime. Violence Police Studies. New York: National New York: Basic Books. Organization for Women Legal Defense and Zimring, Franklin (2003) The Contradictions of American Education Fund. Capital Punishment. New York: Oxford University Press.

55772-Simon-Ch10.indd772-Simon-Ch10.indd 224141 88/6/2012/6/2012 11:53:1511:53:15 AMAM