No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
America's extraordinary penal state: A structural explanation
Abstract
Americans, above all poor Black Americans, are subject to extraordinary levels of police violence, incarceration, and penal control—levels that exist nowhere else in the developed world. This article outlines a comparative, structural explanation of America's extraordinary penal state, pointing to the structural arrangements and historical processes that created it and keep it in place; describing how these political and economic structures differ from those of other nations; and indicating how the macro-structures of political economy interact with community-level processes of social ordering and informal social control to shape street-level practices of crime, policing, and punishment. The article goes beyond the existing “political economy and punishment” literature by broadening the explicandum to include America's extraordinary levels of criminal and police violence; by describing the interaction of social and penal controls; by detailing the negative social indicators associated with America's peculiar political economy; and by highlighting causal factors such as social control deficits, state capacity limitations, and the effect of neighborhood disorganization and danger on the actions of criminal justice officials.
This paper argues that the second presidency of Donald J. Trump represents the decline of both American democracy and American imperialism. American power was at its peak during the postwar boom and early Cold War when its imperialism could appear to be universalism. In this period, American democracy was legitimized by Fordist mass society. This period was the height of social liberalism, in which inequalities within the United States were being reduced. Imperialism is the capitalist attempt to solve the intractable contradiction between global economy and the nation-state. This intractable contradiction reasserted itself as growing international economic competition became the full-scale globalization of industrial capitalist production. Neoliberalism responded to the crisis tendencies of globalization by undermining the national social contract and disorganizing social life. With the collapse of its superpower adversary, the Soviet Union, the United States sought to use military dominance to shore up its declining relative economic power. This attempt, doomed to failure, unveiled naked American imperialism, undermined the universalistic ethos that previously legitimized American democracy, and produced fascist tendencies that fueled Trump’s rise to the presidency. This president’s rise to power is the product of the intractable contradictions facing imperialism in the age of globalized production.
America is the one of the wealthiest nations on earth. So why do so many Americans struggle to make ends meet? Why is it so difficult for those who start at the bottom to reach the middle class? And why, if a rising economic tide lifts all boats, have middle-class incomes been growing so slowly?
Social Democratic America explains how this has happened and how we can do better. Lane Kenworthy argues that we can improve economic security, expand opportunity, and ensure rising living standards for all by moving toward social democracy. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of social policy in America and other affluent countries, he proposes a set of public social programs, including universal early education, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, wage insurance, the government as employer of last resort, and many others. Kenworthy looks at common objections to social democracy, such as the oft-repeated claim that Americans don't want big government, which he readily debunks. Indeed, we already have in place a host of effective and popular social programs, from Social Security to Medicare to public schooling. Moreover, the available evidence suggests that rich nations can generate the tax revenues needed to pay for generous social programs while maintaining an innovative and growing economy, and without restricting liberty.
Can it happen? Kenworthy describes how the US has been progressing slowly but steadily toward a genuine social democracy for nearly a century. Controversial and powerful, Social Democratic America shows that the good society doesn't require a radical break from our past; we just need to continue in the direction we are already heading.
Background
Higher availability of firearms has been connected to higher rates of interpersonal violence in previous studies. Yet, those studies have focused mainly on the United States, or used aggregated international data to study firearm violence. Whether those aggregated findings are applicable to understanding the phenomenon in continental Europe specifically remains unclear. The aim of this systematic review is to bring together all studies that exclusively use European data.
Methods
Nine databases were searched, resulting in more than 1900 individual studies. These studies were assessed on relevance and eligibility for this study, based on their title, abstract and full text. Information on study characteristics, operationalizations of main concepts and study results were extracted from the six eligible studies.
Results
Four studies assessed the impact of firearm restrictive regulations on the rate of firearm homicides. Two other studies correlated rates of firearm availability and -violence. Results vary: some studies show a clear decline once availability of firearms is restricted, while others indicate a limited effect on only a very specific subgroup, such as female victims, or national guards with weapons at home. Moreover, studies used various operationalizations for firearm availability, thereby decreasing the comparability of findings.
Conclusion
Empirical research exclusively using European data is still lacking. To increase comparability of future studies, methodological inconsistencies and regional gaps need to be overcome. Assessing how firearm availability can be measured with reliable and valid proxies across countries will be a crucial first step to improve future research on the link between firearms and firearm violence.
In spite of long‐term declines in the violent victimization of U.S. police officers, the danger of police work continues to structure police socialization, culture, and behavior. Existing research, though attentive to police behavior and deviance that negatively affects the public, analytically ignores how the danger of policing engenders officer behavior that harms police themselves. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews in three U.S. police departments, this article describes how police are informally and formally socialized into the danger imperative—a cultural frame that emphasizes violence and the need for officer safety—and its effect on officer behavior. As a result of perception mediated through the danger imperative, officers engage in policy‐compliant and policy‐deviant behaviors to protect themselves from violence. Unfortunately, policy‐deviant behaviors such as unauthorized highspeed driving and not wearing a seatbelt, though justified in the name of safety, lead to catastrophic car accidents that injure and kill both police and members of the public. This article concludes with discussion of how seemingly mundane policy deviant behaviors are a reflection of assumptions within police culture that undergird police practices that damage public wellbeing and perpetuate boarder inequalities in U.S. policing.
While Scandinavia in general and Norway in particular have been the focus of much criminological interest, the work of probation has largely been overlooked in favour of prisons. This article seeks therefore to contribute to our knowledge of Norwegian penality and desistance by analysing how probation caseworkers describe their practice. Caseworkers have a relational, contextualised understanding of probation clients and the challenges they face. That being said, even in a Scandinavian welfare state, caseworkers see the process of reintegration and change as difficult, highlighting a lack of human and social capital and the challenges of navigating an increasingly complex and impersonal welfare apparatus.
Year after year, in poll after poll, crime tops the list of American anxieties. Indeed, crime is seen by many people as the number one problem in the United States, a threat to the quality of life unparalleled in any other developed country. Now two legal scholars, Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, have conducted intensive research on the question and have reached a startling conclusion--crime is not the problem. America's great problem, they argue, is lethal violence. In Crime is Not the Problem, Zimring and Hawkins revolutionize the way we think about crime and violence--by forcing us to distinguish between crime and violence. The authors reveal that when we compare the United States to other industrialized nations, in most categories of nonviolent crime (burglary, theft, and other property offenses), American crime rates are comparable--even lower, in some cases. Moreover, this general trend holds true when we compare specific cities of roughly the same size (New York and London, Los Angeles and Sydney). As the authors show, crimes like burglary and theft are a part of modern urban life worldwide. Only when it comes to lethal violence does the United States outpace other Western nations, with homicide rates many, many times greater. Equally interesting, the authors find that most killings in America are unconnected to criminal activity (that is, more murders stem from arguments than from break-ins or muggings). But if high property-crime rates don't kill innocent victims in other countries, why are the risks so much greater that victims will be killed or maimed in the United States? And what can be done to bring the death rate from American violence down to tolerable levels? To address these questions, the authors take a hard look at what is believed about the causes of lethal violence. Here, too, the conventional wisdom about the causes of violence is subject to revision. The impact of television and movie violence on rates of homicide is wildly over-rated, as Zimring and Hawkins demonstrate with data from Europe and Japan. By contrast, it is hard to overestimate the importance of guns--used in 70% of all killings--in the distinctively high rates of deadly violence in America. Reducing lethal violence required different tactics than fighting a general war on crime, the authors conclude. They argue that traditional law and order, tough on crime campaigns blur the distinctions between lethal violence and other offenses, they argue. Lawmakers need to craft a sophisticated response that specifically addresses death dealing mayhem. In Crime is Not the Problem, Zimring and Hawkins reshape the debate about crime in the United States, throwing sharp new light on old questions and suggesting new directions for public policy. By making the crucial distinction between lethal violence and crime in general, they clear the ground for a targeted, far more effective response to the real crisis in American society.
Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal? In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime. This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.
The book offers an incisive collection of contemporary research into the problems of crime control and punishment. It has three inter-related aims: to take stock of current thinking on punishment, regulation, and control in the early years of a new century and in the wake of a number of critical junctures, including 9/11, which have transformed the social, political, and cultural environment; to present a selection of the diverse epistemological and methodological frameworks which inform current research; and finally to set out some fruitful directions for the future study of punishment. The contributions to this collection cover some of the most exciting and challenging areas of current research including terrorism and the politics of fear, penality in societies in transition, penal policy and the construction of political identity, the impact of digital culture on modes of compliance, the emergent hegemony of information and surveillance systems, and the evolving politics of victimhood. Taken together, this work draws connections between local problems of crime control, transnational forms of governance, and the ways in which certain political and jurisprudential discourses have come to dominate policy and practice in western penal systems. ERRATUM The sentence on p. 153, lines 5-7 should read “...if welfare expenditure had not risen but remained at its 1987 level, the rise in imprisonment would have been 20 per cent greater than actually occurred, i.e. from 75 in 1987 to 99 in 1998.” No other part of the book is affected by this correction.
Police for the Future analyses what the police are accomplishing in modern democratic countries and whether changes are needed. It argues that the police are failing to provide the protection against crime that the public so desperately wants. It assesses the impediments to effective crime prevention, describes the most promising reforms being tried by police, and analyses the choices modern societies have with respect to creating truly effective police forces. Based on extensive research in Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, and the United States, it addresses four specific questions: (1) Are the police preventing crime? (2) Why are they not? (3) What changes could make them more successful? and (4) What reforms would produce a more effective crime-prevention police? Bayley analyses these questions in a style accessible to laypersons and specialists concerned about contemporary crime and criminal justice.
The relationship between ‘punishment’ and ‘welfare’ is by now a well-established topic of theory and research in historical, sociological, and comparative studies of punishment. In recent years that relationship—and in particular the balance between penal and welfare approaches—has also become a focal point for social movements working to transform criminal justice, and more generally for activists seeking to shift power and resources away from police and prisons towards social service and public health approaches to crime control. This chapter discusses the punishment-welfare relationship as a matter of history, sociology, and comparative social policy, summarizing what we know, identifying promising lines of research, and commenting on key areas of contention. As a theoretical matter, it is argued that future research ought to view penal and welfare policies in relation to the underlying social problems these policies purportedly address and also in relation to the larger social and economic structures that shape these social problems and the policies that deal with them. By way of political commentary, some considerations are noted that should be borne in mind by activists pressing for a wholesale shift from penal to welfare modes of crime-control.
This book examines the role of stop & frisk as one of America’s predominant crime control strategies. Historically, policing focused on responding quickly to reports of crime. Beginning in the mid-1990s, American policing moved toward proactive strategies, hoping to deter crime from occurring in the first place. In theory, stop & frisk promotes deterrence in two ways: by increasing an offender’s risk of being caught and punished, and by discouraging the general public from considering offending in the first place. In law, stop & frisk was validated by the Supreme Court as a reasonable compromise between limiting the personal freedoms of Americans and recognizing the risks presented by an increasingly armed and crime-ridden society. Officers could frisk an individual for a weapon even without the traditional requirement of probable cause. This book investigates stop & frisk in actual practice. It examines its origins as Chicago’s predominant strategy for responding to violent crime. The story includes the political agendas of two mayors and four chiefs of police. Further chapters examined how stop & frisk played itself out on the streets of Chicago, and its impact on public opinion. The book also examines the views of police officers who did the work of stop & frisk, and an analysis of its impact on murders and shootings. A final chapter considers alternatives to stop & frisk as it was practiced in Chicago.
The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty’s focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their impact on social, political and economic life, now present themselves among the most urgent issues facing scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Key among these is the relationship between inequality, crime and punishment. The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox by unpacking these relationships in different contexts. The causal mechanisms underlying these correlations call for investigation by means of a sustained programme of research bringing different disciplines to bear on the problem. This volume develops an interdisciplinary approach which builds on but goes beyond recent comparative and historical research on the institutional, cultural and political-economic factors shaping crime and punishment so as better to understand whether, and if so how and why, social and economic inequality influences levels and types of crime and punishment, and conversely whether crime and punishment shape inequalities.
This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. It finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the 'Golden Era' of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.
The programmes that make up the welfare state vary from nation to nation and from time to time, and the balance between markets and government, and free enterprise and social protection, is perennially in question. In contemporary political debate the welfare state seems mostly to be viewed as a problem rather than a solution, and welfare programmes appear constantly on the defensive. The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction describes the modern welfare state, explaining its historical and contemporary significance and arguing that far from being ‘a failure’ or ‘a problem’, welfare states are an essential element of contemporary capitalism, and a vital concomitant of democratic government.
Police in the United States stand out in the developed world for their reliance on deadly force. Other nations in the Americas, however, feature higher or similar levels of fatal police violence (FPV). Cross-national comparative analyses can help identify stable and malleable factors that distinguish high-FPV from low-FPV countries. Two factors that clearly stand out among high-FPV nations are elevated rates of gun violence—which fosters a preoccupation with danger and wide latitude to use preemptive force—and ethnoracial inequality and discord. The latter seems to be tied to another fundamental difference between the United States and most other developed nations—the “radically decentralized structure of U.S. policing” (Bayley & Stenning 2016). Hyperlocalism limits the influence of external oversight, along with expertise and resources for effective training, policy implementation, and accountability. However, elevated rates of FPV among some Latin American countries with relatively centralized policing demonstrate that decentralization is not a necessary condition for high FPV. Likewise, relatively low FPV in Spain and Chile suggest that achieving low FPV is also possible without the extensive resources and training that appear to suppress FPV in wealthy Northern European nations.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 6 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
This chapter is an exposition and critical assessment of Nicola Lacey’s work on punishment and comparative political economy. It traces the trajectory of Lacey’s work, describing how she was the first to bring the ‘varieties of capitalism’ framework to bear on the central questions of comparative penology and how she then proceeded to use an expanded version of the framework to develop an original explanation of American penal exceptionalism. The chapter then seeks to assess Lacey’s work by examining the theoretical fit between her political economy framework and the institutional characteristics of systems of criminal punishment, paying particular regard to the causal mechanism hypotheses that underpin her account.
Critics on both the left and the right increasingly use the term “mass incarceration” to call attention to the unprecedented scale of, and racial inequities in, the U.S. criminal legal system—and the havoc they wreak. This book shows that the criminal legal response to lawbreaking has continued to intensify even as lawmakers increasingly embrace criminal justice reform. It also identifies three dynamics that help explain why mass incarceration persists despite plummeting crime rates and widespread efforts to reduce prison populations. These incarcerative forces include the political and cultural dynamics surrounding the issue of violence, resistance to criminal legal system reform in suburban and especially rural counties, and the failure of the most popular drug policy reforms (including drug courts) to meaningfully reduce the reach of the criminal legal system or racial inequities in it. The second part of the book identifies three broad political and policy shifts that would significantly reduce the scale of punishment while also addressing the social problems to which it is a (misguided) response. These include the enactment of a twenty-year maximum sentence and the expansion of restorative justice principles and practices that offer alternative ways of promoting accountability and healing. Meaningful harm-reduction-based drug policy reforms, including the expansion of alternative responses to low-level crime and disorder that operate outside the criminal legal system, enhanced access to medication-assisted treatment, and investment in low-income housing, including Housing First initiatives, are also needed.
Racial inequality is a foundational feature of the criminal justice system in the United States. Here we offer a psychological account for how Americans have come to tolerate a system that is so at odds with their professed egalitarian values. We argue that beliefs about the nature of racism—as being solely due to prejudiced individuals rather than structural factors that disadvantage marginalized racial groups—work to uphold racial stratification in the criminal justice system. Although acknowledging structural racism facilitates the perception of and willingness to reduce racial inequality in criminal justice outcomes, many Americans appear willfully ignorant of structural racism in society. We reflect on the role of psychological science in shaping popular understandings of racism and discuss how to contribute more meaningfully to its reduction.
Understanding long-run patterns in the incarceration of Black Americans requires integrating the study of racial inequality with the study of political economy. I offer a parsimonious framework describing how the Black incarceration rate has been affected by the dynamics of exploitation and exclusion over time and across space. This framework helps to explain otherwise puzzling facts, like why the Black incarceration rate was lower in the South than in the North for much of the 20th century, why it was lowest in the South’s cotton belt, and why it began to tick upward when it did. It also enables us to better understand recent changes in racial and class inequality in incarceration in the United States.
This book explores the difference in the distributive policies of the United States and Europe. It seeks answers to why Americans are less willing than Europeans to redistribute from the rich to the poor. It finds that redistribution is influenced by political institutions, ethnic heterogeneity, and beliefs about the nature of poverty.
Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT) was originally formulated as a quintessentially macro-level theory of crime focused on the properties of large-scale social systems. The main substantive claim of the theory is that an institutional structure characterized by the dominance of the economy over other, non-economic institutions tends to be conducive to high levels of crime. Such economic dominance in the institutional structure is theorized to be manifested through three primary processes: the norms and values associated with the economy penetrate into other realms of social life; non-economic roles tend to be accommodated to the requirements of economic roles when conflicts emerge; and non-economic functions and roles are devalued relative to economic functions and roles. Economic dominance in the configuration of social institutions is linked with crime via complementary institutional and cultural dynamics. The enfeeblement of non-economic institutions accompanying economic dominance limits their capacity to perform their distinctive social control and socialization functions, and anomie permeates the culture. The defining feature of such anomie is that the egoistic or utilitarian motives associated with the market economy prevail, and technical expediency guides the selection of the means to pursue personal goals.
IAT has informed a growing body of research dedicated to explaining cross-national variation in crime rates. While empirical studies have generated mixed results, the research literature is generally supportive of the theory. The most consistent conclusion from these studies is that the scope and generosity of the welfare state are associated with reduced levels of crime, especially lethal criminal violence, either directly or by mitigating the effects of other criminogenic conditions, such as economic inequality or economic insecurity. The precise nature of the effects of the different social institutions on crime, for example whether they exhibit “mediating” or “moderating” relationships, remains uncertain. The cultural dynamics informed by IAT have received less attention, but recently some efforts to incorporate culture have been promising. Along with the studies conducted exclusively at the level of nation states, an emerging area of research applies IAT in a multilevel framework. The results have been mixed here as well, but these studies have indicated how structural marketization translates into shared values that help explain individual variation in criminality. Several challenges remain for future research. IAT is cast at a high level of abstraction, which creates ambiguities about the precise nature of any causal structure among variables and the most appropriate procedures for operationalizing the main concepts. Moreover, research indicates that it might be important to focus not only on the strength but also on the content of non-economic institutions as the economy penetrates into non-economic institutions. Another challenge pertains to the role of religion as a non-economic institution, given research revealing that its functioning as a protective non-economic institution deviates from that of other non-economic institutions.
Between 1980 and 2007, probation rates in the United States skyrocketed alongside imprisonment rates; since 2007, both forms of criminal justice control have declined in use. Although a large literature in criminology and related fields has explored the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, very little research has explored the parallel rise of mass probation. This review takes stock of our knowledge of probation in the United States. In the first section, I trace the expansion of probation historically, across states, and for specific demographic groups. I then summarize the characteristics of adults on probation today and what we know about probation revocation. Lastly, I review the nascent literature on the causal effects of probation for individuals, families, neighborhoods, and society. I end by discussing a plan for research and the growing movement to blunt the harms of mass supervision.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 3 is January 13, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Violence is a serious public health issue in the U.S. This research compares the US and other high-income countries in terms of violent death. We used data from the World Health Organization for populous, high-income countries. Data from CDC's WISQARS and WONDER systems were used to assess mortality data among US white and non-white populations and in low-, medium-, and high-gun states in 2015. Death rates per 100,000 populations were calculated overall, by age, and by sex. Poisson and negative binomial regression were used to test for significance. The homicide rate in the US was 7.5 times higher than the homicide rate in the other high-income countries combined, which was largely attributable to a firearm homicide rate that was 24.9 times higher. The overall firearm death rate was 11.4 times higher in the US than in other high-income countries. In this dataset, 83.7% of all firearm deaths, 91.7% of women killed by guns, and 98.1% of all children aged 0–4 years killed by guns were from the US. Firearm homicide rates were 36 times higher in high-gun US states and 13.5 times higher in low-gun US states than the firearm homicide rate in other high-income countries combined. The firearm homicide rate among the US white population was 12 times higher than the firearm homicide rate in other high-income countries. The US firearm death rate increased between 2003 and 2015 and decreased in other high-income countries. The US continues to be an outlier among high-income countries with respect to firearm deaths.
American cities today are simultaneously the same and different from Wilson’s classic portrayal in The Truly Disadvantaged ([1987] 2012), first published over 30 years ago. Concentrated poverty and racial segregation endure, as do racial gaps in multiple aspects of wellbeing. But mass incarceration, the dramatic drop in violent crime, immigration, rising income segregation, the suburbanisation of poverty, and other macrosocial trends have transformed the urban scene. The paradoxical result is that cities today are both better and worse off. In this paper, I put forth a unifying framework on persistence and change in urban inequality, highlighting a theory of neighbourhood effects and the higher-order structure of the contemporary metropolis. I apply this analytic framework to examine: (1) neighbourhood inequality as an important driver and mediator of urban transformation; (2) racial disparities across the life course in compounded deprivation, poisoned development, and intergenerational mobility; and (3) how everyday spatial mobility beyond the local neighbourhood is producing new forms of social isolation and higher-order segregation. I conclude with a challenge to dominant policy perspectives on urban racial inequality.
The Space between Us brings the connection between geography, psychology, and politics to life. By going into the neighborhoods of real cities, Enos shows how our perceptions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups are intuitively shaped by where these groups live and interact daily. Through the lens of numerous examples across the globe and drawing on a compelling combination of research techniques including field and laboratory experiments, big data analysis, and small-scale interactions, this timely book provides a new understanding of how geography shapes politics and how members of groups think about each other. Enos’ analysis is punctuated with personal accounts from the field. His rigorous research unfolds in accessible writing that will appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike, illuminating the profound effects of social geography on how we relate to, think about, and politically interact across groups in the fabric of our daily lives.
In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments rife with violence. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over one hundred individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability despite their efforts to rejoin society. Western and his research team conducted comprehensive interviews with men and women released from the Massachusetts state prison system who returned to neighborhoods around Boston. Western finds that for most, leaving prison is associated with acute material hardship. In the first year after prison, most respondents could not afford their own housing and relied on family support and government programs, with half living in deep poverty. Many struggled with chronic pain, mental illnesses, or addiction-the most important predictor of recidivism. Most respondents were also unemployed. Some older white men found union jobs in the construction industry through their social networks, but many others, particularly those who were black or Latino, were unable to obtain full-time work due to few social connections to good jobs, discrimination, and lack of credentials. Violence was common in their lives, and often preceded their incarceration. In contrast to the stereotype of tough criminals preying upon helpless citizens, Western shows that many former prisoners were themselves subject to lifetimes of violence and abuse and encountered more violence after leaving prison, blurring the line between victims and perpetrators. Western concludes that boosting the social integration of former prisoners is key to both ameliorating deep disadvantage and strengthening public safety. He advocates policies that increase assistance to those in their first year after prison, including guaranteed housing and health care, drug treatment, and transitional employment. By foregrounding the stories of people struggling against the odds to exit the criminal justice system, Homeward shows how overhauling the process of prisoner reentry and rethinking the foundations of justice policy could address the harms of mass incarceration.
Inter-ethnic residential segregation is correlated with intergroup bias and conflict, poorly functioning states and civil societies, weak economic development, and ethnocentric political behavior. As such, segregation has been a subject of long-standing interest. However, segregation has not been assigned in randomized controlled trials, so the observed correlations may be spurious and the mechanism behind these correlations is poorly understood. In two experiments, we randomly assign segregation in a laboratory and demonstrate that segregation affects perceptions of other people and causes intergroup bias in costly decision-making. Rather than segregation merely inhibiting intergroup contact, we demonstrate that segregation directly affects perception and thus can affect intergroup relations even when holding contact constant.
This review sets out four main explanatory paradigms of penal policy—focusing on, in turn, crime, cultural dynamics, economic structures and interests, and institutional differences in the organization of different political economies as the key determinants of penal policy. We argue that these paradigms are best seen as complementary rather than competitive and present a case for integrating them analytically in a comparative political economy framework situated within the longue dur´ee of technology regime change. To illustrate this, we present case studies of one exceptional case—the United States—and of one substantive variable—race. Race has long been thought to be of importance in most of these paradigms and provides a pertinent example of how the different dynamics intersect in practice. We conclude by summarizing the explanatory challenges and research questions that we regard as most urgent for the further development of the field and point to the approaches that will be needed if scholars are to meet these challenges and answer these questions. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology Volume 1 is January 13, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Sentencing practice in Germany has long been stable, reflecting slightly falling crime rates. Public prosecutors dismiss the majority of cases that the police file with them as "cleared." In a significant percentage of provable cases, prosecutors demand a penance payment of suspects in exchange for dismissal; many others are dismissed without any consequence for the suspect. Criminal courts dispose of more than half of cases in a written procedure, routinely accepting the sentence proposals of prosecutors. A growing number of trials result in "bargained" sentences, that is, sentences agreed on among the judge and the parties. Sentence severity in Germany is generally low. Life sentences are exceptional, and release on parole is available. Overall, only 5 percent of convicted offenders must serve a prison sentence. Another 12 percent receive a suspended prison sentence, and the rest are fined. German society at present does not appear to regard crime and criminal justice as pressing problems. Operating in the shadow of the public interest, agents of criminal justice can pursue a fairly liberal and rational course.
The rise of mass incarceration in the United States is one of the most critical outcomes of the last half-century. Incarceration Nation offers the most compelling explanation of this outcome to date. This book combines in-depth analysis of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon's presidential campaigns with sixty years of data analysis. The result is a sophisticated and highly accessible picture of the rise of mass incarceration. In contrast to conventional wisdom, Peter K. Enns shows that during the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, politicians responded to an increasingly punitive public by pushing policy in a more punitive direction. The book also argues that media coverage of rising crime rates helped fuel the public's punitiveness. Equally as important, a decline in public punitiveness in recent years offers a critical window into understanding current bipartisan calls for criminal justice reform.
In the current economic climate, this book could not be more timely. One of the world's leading experts explores the connections between crime and economic conditions, linking the formal economy to the operation of illegal markets and both, in turn, to changes in the forms and levels of crime over time. The book offers a readable, interesting and accessible analysis, covering a range of theoretical and empirical approaches. It addresses a range of different criminal activities, including: violent crime; burglary; drug crime; white collar crime; organised crime; fraud; corporate crime Crime and the Economy is written in plain English, technical terms (when used) are be explained clearly, examples punctuate the discussion, and visual material is used throughout to explain the topics under discussion. It is essential reading for undergraduates and graduates in criminology and sociology.
Youth justice in the Netherlands has been riven with ambivalences since the early 1980s. juvenile involvement in property crime has been stable and ill violent crime has increased somewhat, though less than is shown by police data. Nonetheless, the public and politicians respond as if the problems were worse. Policies and laws have shifted toward greater emphasis on young offenders' rights and on more use of repressive measures than earlier when welfare values were more dominant. In practice, however, commitment to welfare values remains strong, and welfare institutions play active roles responding to young offenders. Changed criteria make waiver of young offenders to adult courts easier, but the numbers waived have fallen, and most who are waived receive community penalties. Statutes have authorized longer confinement terms for young offenders, but the use of long sentences has declined. There has been a substantial increase in the use of community penalties, including community service and victim compensation, and new programs have given the police greater powers to take action against alleged offenders. International conventions and treaties are taken seriously in the Netherlands and have affected the youth justice system in important ways.
Denmark, strictly speaking, does not have a juvenile justice system. The age of criminal responsibility is fifteen. Offenders younger than that are dealt with by social welfare authorities. Offenders aged fifteen and older are dealt with in regular criminal courts under the same laws, procedures (with a few exceptions), and circumstances as adults. In practice, the divide is not so sharp. Social welfare authorities can place children in secure institutions, though they seldom do so. Offenders under age eighteen benefit from a number of sentencing policies and options not available for adults. These include shorter sentences, diversion to the welfare authorities, and special sentencing options. Crime rates generally and for young offenders were stable or declining throughout the 1990s. Criminal justice policy generally and concerning young offenders has become increasingly politicized, and tougher laws and policies have been enacted. Owing, however, to the influence of international standards, renewing confidence in rehabilitative programs, and Danish skepticism about incarceration of young offenders, punishments for young offenders in the 1990s did not become markedly harsher, as enforcement of prison sentences declined.
This book compares interest group participation in the development of crime and justice policy across the local, state and national levels of government and has three main contributions to law, policy and criminology scholarship. First, it provides a detailed analysis of the narrow and often parochial nature of national and state crime politics, in contrast to the active and intense local political mobilization on crime by racial minorities and the urban poor. The book illustrates the ways the structure of U.S. federalism has contributed to the current situation in which national policy responses to crime overlook black and poor victims of violence and how highly organized, narrowly focused interest groups, such as the National Rifle Association, have a disproportionate influence in crime politics. This study also demonstrates that urban minorities and the poor mobilize locally to address crime as one of many social ills, though their tactics are often unconventional and their resources limited. Second, it illustrates how the absence of these groups from the policy process at the state and national levels has encouraged the development of policy frames that are highly skewed in favor of police, prosecutors, and narrow citizen interests, whose policy preferences often converge on increasing punishments for offenders. That this is true even at the national level, where policy scholars often assume the policy process is more open and porous than at subregional levels, is a major contribution of the book. Finally, the comparison of group participation across legislative venues on a single policy issue contributes to our understanding of group theory.