Penal Expansion Research Articles

Incarceration and mortality in the United States

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the role of America's overcrowded prisons as vectors of ill health, but robust analyses of the degree to which high rates of incarceration impact population-level health outcomes remain scarce. In this paper, we use county-level panel data from 2927 counties across 43 states between 1983 and 2014 and a novel instrumental variable technique to study the causal effect of penal expansion on age-standardised cause-specific and all-cause mortality rates. We find that higher rates of incarceration have substantively large effects on deaths from communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases in the short and medium term, whilst deaths from non-communicable disease and from all causes combined are impacted in the short, medium, and long run. These findings are further corroborated by a between-unit analysis using coarsened exact matching and a simulation-based regression approach to predicting geographically anchored mortality differences.

Institutional Castling: Military Enlistment and Mass Incarceration in the United States.

The military is a major state provider of employment, occupational training, and educational subsidies. Yet military downsizing and its increased selectivity during penal expansion may have cleaved off employment opportunities for disadvantaged men. We show how institutional castling—the shifting prominence of competing institutions in the lives of specific demographic groups—has affected the underlying risk of military employment and penal confinement. Black veterans who have dropped out of high school are less likely to be incarcerated than their nonveteran counterparts, and declines in the employment rates of military servicemembers with less than a high school education are associated with large increases in incarceration rates. The military’s critical role in providing institutional protection from the penal system has eroded for young, undereducated African American men.

Feminism and Penal Expansion: The Role of Rights-Based Criminal Law in Post-Neoliberal Ecuador

This article analyses feminist discourses on the criminalisation of violence against women in Ecuador, after the enactment of a “post-neoliberal” constitution. It responds to arguments in feminist legal theory, which affirm that penal expansion thrives through neoliberal globalisation, and that certain feminists have sponsored this carceral-neoliberal alliance, over and above redistributive concerns. However, in Ecuador, many feminists who participated in a recent criminalisation process also endorsed the post-neoliberal government’s social redistribution programme. Ecuadorian feminism therefore complicates current discussions on carceral and governance feminism, which link penal expansion with neoliberalism and an absence of redistributive concerns. Ecuadorian left-leaning feminists use rights-based frameworks to reconcile penal interventions with potential abuses of coercive power. This allows them to regard criminal justice as minimally problematic within the redistributive agenda they endorse. At the same time, the penal approach of Ecuadorian feminists runs the danger of marginalising legally pluralistic approaches to justice.

Scaling Up or Scaling Back? The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Leveraging Federal Interventions for Abolition

Antiprison activists have often turned the federal court system to reduce the violence of the carceral state. However, such reform attempts have too often had the unintended consequence of fortifying the penal system. In this article, I interrogate one such intervention—a federal court order that encompassed the Louisiana Department of Corrections from 1975 to 1998. I argue that while the lawsuit was declared a success in reforming Angola, the federal court’s intervention buttressed and legitimated the growth of the Louisiana penal system. This paradox was produced through the limits of liberal reform ideology that failed to recognize the structural violence of incarceration. Rather, the federal courts located violence with prisoners instead of the punitive power of the state and racial capitalism. This framework not only led to an increase in punitive practices within Angola, it came to underpin penal expansion as the primary solution to cyclical overcrowding.

The role of symbolic politics in exceptional crime policy debate: a study of the 2014 Swedish general election

ABSTRACTSymbolic politics are often considered to be closely linked to an alarmist rhetoric, as well as to punitive crime policy initiatives. This article explores the symbolic dimension of the Swedish crime policy debate. Since Sweden is frequently depicted as an antithesis to punitive Anglophone societies, exploring symbolic politics in this setting might expand our understanding of what symbolic statements may consist of. The article analyses the electoral campaign preceding the Swedish general election of 2014, with the aim of identifying which symbolic statements occupy a central position in the debate through the use of a qualitative content analysis. This analysis reveals an ambiguous political rhetoric, comprising morally and emotionally charged condemnatory statements about getting tough on crime, as well as reformist and restrained references to expert knowledge and long-term solutions. On the one hand, these reformist statements strengthen the image of Swedish crime policy as being based on ideals such as rationality and humanity. On the other, they also serve to legitimize and obscure penal expansion.

Welfare Crises, Penal Solutions, and the Origins of the “Welfare Queen”

This article contributes to the scholarship on mass incarceration by highlighting the ways penal expansion intervened in the history of other state institutions. It argues that the increasing criminalization of welfare fraud was instrumental in undermining political support for key social welfare programs, particularly Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). In the 1970s, lawmakers and welfare administrators enlisted law enforcement’s expanding authority to contain growing welfare costs and counter demands from the welfare rights movement. It was from these anti-welfare fraud campaigns that the racialized caricature of the “welfare queen” entered the political lexicon. Recruiting the criminal justice system further stigmatized AFDC recipients by positioning them as criminally suspect, financially secure, and morally unworthy. I argue that while increased penalties for welfare fraud did not swell the penal system to the same extent as initiatives like the War on Drugs, they shaped popular knowledge about poor families and undermined faith in the state’s capacity to mitigate inequality.

The Hate Threshold

Hate crime laws have emerged within a climate of penal expansion and identity politics. They contain ideological claims designed to reconfigure social norms and regimes of difference. This article employs the concept of the hate threshold to examine the principles and practices that turn an ordinary crime into a hate crime and the normative messages that flow from this. The hate threshold takes three major elements – emotion, causation and difference – as a framework for analysing how the legal rules are operationalised. Analysis of Australian sentencing aggravation law reveals that courts have set a relatively rigorous standard for offender sentiment and causation. However, the development of a more fluid threshold around the element of difference raises questions about the constitutive implications when law ‘misfires’. This analysis of the law in action provides a material foundation for reflecting on the capacity of hate crime law to engage in larger processes of remoralisation.

From ‘Criminality’ to Marginality: Rioting against a Broken State

This article offers an analysis and critique of the political response to the 2011 urban riots in England. A brief account of the riots is advanced, where I connect the eruptions to the rise of advanced marginality and class/territorial stigmatisation in English cities, not only in terms of material deprivation but to the denial of dignity it implies. The article then re-places the swift deployment of punitive action and the ‘broken society’ discourse in response to the riots within the broader re-engineering of the state according to a neoliberal blueprint that articulates (inter alia) social welfare reduction and penal expansion at the bottom of the class structure, in contrast to a laissez-faire attitude at the top. By paying closer attention to the changing relationship between information and power (and in particular, the role of conservative think tanks), what Paul Gilroy calls a “poverty of the imagination” in addressing urban problems is exposed and challenged, revealing that the main issue to be addressed is not a broken society but a broken state.

Small, Medium, Large…Or Extra-Large: Privatization and Penal Expansion

A surprisingly neglected feature of the literature on so-called mass imprisonment is the number not of prisoners but of prisons. This brief piece presents data on Europe showing that having a low imprisonment rate is associated with having a high number of prisons per capita. This makes sense when we look at high imprisonment countries: the countries that use prison the most also have the biggest prisons. The paper explores this relationship through consideration of the role of that the private sector might have on determining the typical capacity of prisons. The private sector brings incentives for constructing ever larger correctional facilities, but this is part of a broader emergence of a market ethos in criminal justice generally. I conclude by challenging both the efficacy of large prisons and the unexamined claims that bigger is better because of economies of scale and efficiencies of centralisation.

Democracy and its Discontents

The unprecedented increase in U.S. rates of criminal conviction, criminal justice supervi sion, and incarceration constitute a historical ly unique experiment in penal expansion. In creasingly, scholars and activists are investi gating impacts of this uniquely American policy innovation on public safety, families, children, poverty, and employment (Clear et al. 2003; Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2003; Patil lo et al. 2004; Pettit and Western 2004; Travis and Waul 2004; Western 2006). These studies indicate that massive expansion of U.S. criminal justice system has had adverse consequences for incarcerated and poor communities from which they are over whelmingly drawn. Recent studies also sug gest that removal of over two million res idents from official statistics has important implications for measures of social problems such as unemployment and poverty (Western and Beckett 1999; Western and Pettit 2005). While criminologists have long explored how social inequities shape who commits crime and who is punished for doing so, recent scholarship increasingly investigates how pe nal expansion masks yet reproduces social and racial inequality. By highlighting impact of penal ex pansion on citizenship and democracy, The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons and Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and Ameri can Democracy make a significant and novel contribution to this burgeoning literature. Of two, Locked Out is more empirical. By bringing varied data sources, diverse methodologies, and a refreshing creativity to bear on this important topic, Manza and Uggen make a significant contribution to a number of sociological literatures. The Disen franchisement of Ex-Felons offers less origi nal data analysis but greater attention to legal aspects of felony disenfranchisement. Both books offer compelling historical and philosophical reflections on nature and significance of denial of what Supreme Court has called the right preserv ative of all other rights (Hull, p. 1). While conclusions of two books are largely compatible, they offer somewhat divergent The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons, by Elizabeth A. Hull. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006. 217pp. $19.50 paper. ISBN: 1592131859. $59.50 cloth. ISBN: 1592131840.

Visions of Penal Control in the Netherlands

Abstract Following three decades of prolonged decarceration from 1947 to 1974, Dutch penal policy underwent first a gradual, then a more radical, reversal in a period of sustained recarceration after 1975. David Garland’s (2001) theory of the “culture of control” emergent in late modernity to combat rising crime and insecurity is a necessary but insufficient account of the transition. Additional elements in the invocation of pathology legitimizing the transition are periods of unusually steep rises in crime rates, resort to “heart of darkness” symbolism by the media and members of key elites, and a sense of relative underprotection by a critical mass of the public. This combination of influences also drove penal expansion in England and the United States. The past half century has seen the rise and fall of penal hope in the Netherlands. It is, for penal reformers at least, a story that is both inspiring and dispiriting: inspiring because it shows that, even in a modern industrial society and in the contex...

Child Imprisonment: A Case for Abolition

In England and Wales the politicisation of crime and criminal justice policy in general, and youth crime and youth justice policy in particular, has given rise to a USA-inspired ‘new punitiveness’. Penal expansion and substantial growth in the population of child prisoners has consolidated. This article subjects child imprisonment to critical analysis by referring to: the damage and harm that it imposes; its spectacular failings in terms of youth crime prevention and community safety; and the enormous burden that it imposes on the public purse. Ultimately, there can be no rational justification for child imprisonment on the scale currently evident in England and Wales and, on this basis, a case is made for its abolition.

The Macho Penal Economy

The rise of mass incarceration in the USA is related to the historic character of American exceptionalism and the abandonment, over the past few decades, of policies of rehabilitation and radical social reform. The components for a compararable penal expansion are, with the exception of high rates of lethal violence, in process of assembly in some European societies: rates of serious property crime surpassing those in the USA; a shift in the politics of law and order towards `governing through crime' and populist punitiveness; and rising anxieties about risk and insecurity, in particular relating to ethnic minorities and crime. The distinctive character of social democratic societies, which has so far shielded them against mass incarceration and which already face challenge due to globalization, face further adverse comparison with the more deregulated US economy in terms of unemployment rates which are significantly distorted by the size of the American prison population. Economic debate should be better informed of the unprecedented extent to which the penal factor has come to exert a hidden influence on cross-national images of socioeconomic success and failure, and of the costs and benefits of social-democratic relative to more deregulated market economies.