The Origins of Mass Incarceration Daniel D'Amico Adam Gelb Mike Riggs by Susanne Karstedt
- Sunti
- Why Nations Jail by Daniel D'Amico
- international context: Yes , we all know that we are a nation of jailers.
- in recent years many other countries have dramatically increased their incarceration rates
- proposed causes for our high incarceration rate, including racism, our free-market economic system, and our War on Drugs. He finds the latter the most persuasive
- incarceration is particularly bad here - and in certain other countries - because of the public choice effects inherent in common law
- Better Question: How Do We Unjail? by Mike Riggs
- concentrated benefits and dispersed costs tend to operate in criminal justice policy
- Politicians receive the benefits of the system, in that it pays to look tough on crime.
- The purpose of our penal institutions is......to impart respect for the law, to deter crime, and to reintegrate former offenders into society in ways that will ensure they do not offend again. Our current system is manifestly a failure
- Riggs recommends that we turn to penalties other than prison for a significant number of crimes
- Laboratories of Incarceration by Adam Gelb
- Classica distorsione: state government often pays for the prison system, while the local government pays for community supervision. As a result, local governments send former offenders back to prison as a way of saving money
- Great facts and new facts: The end of U.S. mass imprisonment? by Susanne Karstedt
- Karstedt looks at the relationship between wealth and imprisonment.
- Is it really the case that neoliberal nations prefer to warehouse their poor in jails? She finds that the evidence supporting this claim is weak.
- Yet budget constraints seem to reduce incarceration rates, and she says it’s no coincidence that mass imprisonment seems to have peaked and come to a halt in 2009.
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- Saggi
- Why Nations Jail By Daniel D'Amico
- The U.S. imprisonment trend also looks like a hockey stick.... in the 1970s, the line shot up, quintupling by the 2000s.
- Culture, racism, and the drug war obviously matter. But I’d like to challenge some of these presumed causes by simply asking how much they fully explain global
- Ecuador, Indonesia, Cambodia, Israel, Serbia, and Georgia don’t share much economic, partisan, or cultural American-ness, yet all doubled their prison populations in a decade, while Britain took
- no data confirms a consistent relationship between more liberal market economies –or higher economic performance –and larger prison populations.
- Is racism the primary driver of American mass imprisonment?
- In fact, in England, Canada, and Australia, the minority to white inmate ratios all outpace the United States. [8]
- The advent of American mass incarceration also occurred alongside measurable racial progress.
- Is America’s vengeful culture responsible? Again maybe partially, but such features don’t explain why so many other nations have multiplied their prisons without similarly rugged individualists supporting
- Most experimental evidence suggests vengeful preferences are common across identities,
- economist Naci Mocan reports the opposite cultural relationship, with poor, war-torn, and collectivist countries hosting more vengeance.
- shared timing of American incarceration with drug prohibition seems too tightly linked to be coincidence. But prohibition is not a sufficient explanation
- drug violations only make up about 17% of state inmates and represent about 20% of the growth
- Without drug convictions, American incarcerations would have quadrupled rather than quintupled.
- And again, if uniquely American factors cause mass incarceration, then why is there a global
- Current research emphasizes a general relationship between social institutions and incarceration.
- many public choice scholars have noticed that by concentrating perceived deterrent benefits while dispersing costs, democratic politics rewards the expansive spending, employment, and voter appeasement accomplished through criminalization and prison growth.
- Lacey [17] has observed the organization of electoral processes correlate with incarceration rates. Nations with winner-take-all elections host greater political incentives to appease punitive biases.
- my recent paper coauthored with Claudia Williamson shows nations founded in the British common law tradition rather than civil law host larger incarceration rates. While the common law is typically more decentralized, we suspect criminal justice systems were historically founded and subsequently organized more hierarchically relative to other common law social
- Common law: pm eletti.
- From Ferguson to Baltimore we seem to be stuck with the worst of both worlds: racially biased local cops and a militarized national response.
- Saggio
- Great facts and new facts: The end of U.S. mass imprisonment? By Susanne Karstedt
- Why do nations jail? It’s a rich man’s folly, says Jan van Dijk from Tilburg University
- The richer countries are, the more they use imprisonment when meting out punishment to citizens.
- Jan van Dijk has a point even from a historical perspective;
- imprisonment is a tool of criminal justice not affordable to all and sundry.
- United States is a visible outlier.... housing 25% of the world’s prisoners.... by far exceeds imprisonment in the poorest and cruellest dictatorships in the world,
- unprecedented growth and unparalleled size of the U.S. prison population between 1970s and the first decade of the 21st century
- Was this just another case of American exceptionalism, or was the United States in the vanguard... Most criminologists bought into the latter perspective.
- This was the start of the search for the one magic-bullet variable... The emerging candidate was broadly labelled “neo-liberalism.”Neo-liberalism’s manifestations of deregulating the economy and downsizing the welfare state... Another master narrative was based on the observation that nations with majority rules in their electoral processes have higher imprisonment rates. In both cases, the empirical foundations were shaky:
- American criminologist Frank Zimring argues that such “professionalization of punishment”combines several “leniency vectors”that keep imprisonment low.[ 3] It is a defining feature of civil law systems that decisions are made by professionals and according to professional standards, and criminal justice officials are not directly elected. In contrast, communities and the electorate seem to have been a driving force behind skyrocketing imprisonment in the United States.
- Esempio. Voters in California supported criminal justice policies that lay the ground for ever increasing imprisonment in that state;
- The year 2009 provides a reality check for all theorizing on mass imprisonment in the United States: It was the year when imprisonment growth in the United States came to a halt... 2009 was the year after the financial crisis, and this is no coincidence.
- prisons were closed in California, Nebraska, and New York.... estimated savings of nearly $ 340 million
- It comes as a surprise for many criminologists that the same neo-liberals and fiscal hawks who had been blamed for “mass imprisonment”were now in the driving seat for penal reform.
- “Right on Crime,”a conservative think tank, explains the turn in conservative penal policies: “How is it ‘conservative’to spend vast amounts of taxpayer money on a strategy without asking whether it is providing taxpayers with the best public safety return on their investment
- If two trends look like hockey sticks there might be some common ground which kicks them off.
- L'Europa ha meno carcerari xchè per ogni carcerato spende molto di più
- My own research shows that values like liberal individualism and egalitarianism are not related to how many are sent to prison, but significantly to the treatment of prisoners.[ 15] Both might be nonetheless related: more care for the dignity and liberty of those who failed might make nations more cautious in the use of imprisonment, not the least because it increases the costs of imprisonment.
- Many European countries, including Germany, have considerably lower recidivism rates then the United States. Spending on prisoners rather than on warehousing them seems a better way to deliver the goods.
- Policy: x ridurre la mass incarceration promuovere programmi rieducativo. Il vincolo di bilancio fará il suo lavoro.
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