Strategy and Tactics for Building Institutions

If prison populations remain at the high end of historical patterns, then informed policy on whether new penal facilities should be built and where becomes an important issue. This chapter suggests that no state in the federal union should build or expand any further remote prisons in the typical twentieth-century pattern but that penal facilities close to the communities where their residents reside should be built and improved.

An American Surprise

This chapter shows that after a long period of stability, US prison population increased more than fivefold in the 35 years after 1972. A statistical analysis also suggests that even though each state makes independent penal policy, the growth of prison population is best viewed as a single national process.

Why the Prison-Boom Generation?

This chapter explores the issue of what aspects of criminal law and policy had such concentrated impact in the generation after 1970, when prison populations multiplied. There were no aspects of substantive law that seem to explain the pattern, but two operational features and incentives in state and local criminal process might have jointly sparked the explosion. The focus of prosecutors on statistics on convictions and punishments as measures of their adversarial effectiveness started in the 1970s. This focus appears to have combined with the perverse “free lunch” feature of state governments in which county governments, which have most of the power to determine prison terms, pay none of the costs of imprisonment. The reporting systems increased the desire for more substantial punishment, and the total lack of cost to local government inhibited restraint in penal growth.

Restructuring the Governance of Imprisonment

This chapter discusses methods of altering how state governments structure decision-making about imprisonment policy to rationalize outcomes. Changes that enhance the power of state government (which pays for prisons) to control prison terms and populations are important features of these strategic shifts. And making specific judgments about the proper scale of imprisonment should become a prominent part of each state's criminal justice policy.

The Epidemic of Penal Disabilities

This chapter profiles what it calls “the epidemic of penal disabilities” that restrict the liberties and economic prospects of many millions of persons after conviction of crime as well as their innocent family members. Just as the prison population increased by a factor of five in the generation after 1970, so too did the population of persons with felony conviction records, but the number of persons with such records is more than twice as high. There are about 46,000 state and federal laws imposing a wide variety of restrictions, often without any policy justification. Nothing less than a national commission on these often obscure and frequently purposeless prohibitions can bring order to this mess.

Afterword

MANY WHO HAVE read through the prior eight chapters of this analysis may be troubled by two puzzling aspects of the book. The first is a procedural eccentricity in the presentation of my thinking. The most sustained discussion of future trends in American prison and jail populations was presented in ...

Prosecutorial Power and Adversarial Focus

This chapter discusses the role of prosecutorial power in state imprisonment policy. The analysis contrasts the personal preferences of prosecutors for severe punishment as a state policy (that is why they chose to become prosecutors) with the priority of prosecutors to obtain prison terms as a measure of their adversarial effectiveness, the vice that may distort local criminal justice policy. The major ambition of reform in prosecution is to moderate the power as well as the desire to consider incarceration as a measure of effectiveness in public prosecution.

Two Categorical Alternatives to Prisons

This chapter considers what it calls “categorical” shifts in policy to help reduce penal populations. These strategies shift entire categories of government policy that had been traditionally controlled by local criminal justice and state prisons to other parts of government. The first major shift suggested is that drug abuse policy shifts from criminal law to public health, involving police and other first responders but then shifting to institutions of treatment. The second major “categorical” shift takes place within criminal justice, by shifting jurisdiction over aspects of crime custody from prisons to local facilities.

What Happens Next?

This chapter uses statistics from the first decade after the peak of prison population was reached in the United States in 2007 to project the likely trends in imprisonment that can be expected during the period 2020 to 2050. An estimate that takes into account the contrast between the first decade of the great imprisonment increase and the first 10 years after the all-time high suggests a modest decline over the next generation is the most likely pattern for the American penal future. By mid-century, prison and jail populations are likely to still have between half and two-thirds of the expanded 2007 peak rate behind bars.

How American Institutions Encourage and Sustain High Rates of Imprisonment

This chapter explores a series of long-standing features of American government that exaggerated the scale of the penal expansion that started in the 1970s. A large list of features of government and social structure in the United States magnified the level of penal expansion, including the federal system, the public wealth of the late twentieth century, and the politics of crime policy.