American imprisonment and prison officers’ unions

Abstract

One of the most notable aspects of American state prison imprisonment rates is that, as Newburn (2010) recently reminded us, they have for some time varied dramatically both over time and across states. For example, in the early 1970s,1 state prison incarceration rates2 varied from a low of 25 prisoners per 100,000 residents in North Dakota to a high of 166 in North Carolina.3 By 2007–2009, rates had increased so dramatically that the lowest state imprisonment rate was 150 prisoners per 100,000 residents (in Maine) and the highest was 861 (in Louisiana). In absolute terms, Maine’s increase of 105 prisoners per 100,000 residents (from 45 prisoners per 100,000 in 1971–1973 to 150 prisoners per 100,000 in 2007–2009) was the smallest increase and Louisiana’s increase of 756 (from 105 to 861) was the largest.4 For Gottschalk (2006), what is most interesting about this growth in imprisonment in the United States is not, however, its size but the fact that it occurred in the prison systems of all 50 states. With each state in control