Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration. By Michael Jacobson. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Pp. 292. $29.95 cloth.

Abstract

Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration. By Michael Jacobson. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Pp. 292. $29.95 cloth. Reviewed by Candace Kruttschnitt, University of Minnesota The mass incarceration movement in this country has garnered substantial scholarly interest. In fact, it could easily be argued that this movement is responsible for a renewed academic interest in penology and the sociology of punishment. The scholarship in this area, with a few notable exceptions, has focused predominantly on how we can explain the phenomenon of the get touch or penal harm movement (Cullen et al. 2000). A political culture of intolerance, the bureaucratization of prisons, and even the rise of a postmodern penology are all thought to account for this development (Feeley & Simon 1992; Irwin & Austin 1994; Caplow & Simon 1999). Scholars who study the frontline of corrections have noted some of the limitation in this discourse, suggesting that the transformations in punishment are incomplete and often haphazardly realized (e.g., Lynch 1998). But, what has been largely missing from this body of work is a serious consideration of how we might go about changing an excessive reliance on incarceration that has swelled our prison populations to record national and international levels and has absorbed increasing proportions of most states' fiscal resources. Jacobson's Downsizing Prisons tackles this important question. The book is framed for both an academic and a policy audience, although it will probably hold more sway with the latter than the former. Academics will be familiar with many of the arguments he uses to frame his analysis of the current prison system: (1) it is racially and economically biased, (2) punishments are not proportional to the offenses and may not be a deterrent, (3) mass incarceration has substantial negative effects on some communities, (4) alternatives to imprisonment are underutilized, and (5) there is only a weak relationship between prison expansion and crime reduction. But they will not be familiar with his systematic consideration of how we might go about changing our prison system to make it both more socially and fiscally palatable. He employs case studies of both New York City and San Diego to show how different policing strategies both resulted in significant crime reductions and, as well, reductions in their respective prison and jail populations. In an effort to further hammer home the notion that incarceration rates are largely unrelated to drops in crime, Jacobson shows that the states with the largest increases in prison populations did not have the largest drops in crimes. …