Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration: Toward a New Political Economy of the Postwar Carceral State

Abstract

Pick up any recent textbook on modern U.S. history, turn to the last few chapters, and you will find an outline of key developments that have shaped the past four decades or so of the nation’s domestic history. Some chapter headings include “The Decline of Manufacturing,” “Retreat from Liberalism,” “The Beleaguered Social Compact,” “The Rising Tide of Conservatism,” “The Problem of Inequality,” “The End of the Long Boom,” and “Conservatism in the Courts.” Yet few of these textbooks pay attention to one of the most dramatic social transformations of this period. Only Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty! includes as subheadings “The Spread of Imprisonment” and “The Burden of Imprisonment,” signaling to students that one of the changes that makes the world they inherit radically different from that of their parents is the huge numbers of Americans behind bars. As many scholars of crime and punishment have pointed out, only a generation ago the nation’s incarceration rate had remained steady for a century—at about 100 prisoners per 100,000 people—and many criminologists believed that prisons were obsolete and would gradually be supplanted by “community corrections,” treatment facilities, and other alternatives for all but the most incorrigible or violent offenders. Yet, contrary to those optimistic expectations, since 1970 the number of felons confined in state and federal prisons has multiplied by a factor of eight, and the overall prison incarceration rate in the United States has zoomed to nearly 500 per 100,000 people, a fivefold increase. As late as 1977 the prison population had barely surpassed 300,000; the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics figures show that in 2010 the U.S. prison population reached its historic peak of over 1.5 million inmates, after the country had embarked on “the steepest and most sustained increase in the rate of imprisonment that has been recorded since the birth of the modern prison in the nineteenth century.”1