Political Participation Amid Mass Incarceration

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel R. White
Keyword(s):  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Criminal Convictions ◽  
Policy Proposals

Contact with the carceral state—ranging from police stops to prison time—is a frequent experience in the United States, particularly in communities marginalized on the basis of race and class. In recent years, political scientists have sought to measure the impacts of these encounters on individuals’ and communities’ political engagement. This review describes the main sources of evidence in this literature and what we learn from them. I present a series of stylized facts about the carceral state and political behavior, highlighting places where we know a great deal (such as the relative underrepresentation of people with criminal convictions among voters) and places where more work is needed (such as nonvoting participation and community spillovers). Then, I discuss policy proposals that seek to mitigate the political impacts of the carceral state, and what is and is not yet known about what they might accomplish. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Decarceration Problems and Prospects

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd R. Clear
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Policy Reform ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Violent Crimes ◽  
Prison Populations ◽  
Broad Consensus ◽  
Western Democracies

Incarceration rates in the United States are far higher than the world's other Western democracies, so high that they are referred to as mass incarceration. After nearly 40 years of sustained growth in US incarceration rates, a broad consensus exists to bring them down. The Iron Law of Prison Populations directs attention to the fact that 51 different jurisdictional-level penal policies, rather than crime, drive incarceration rates, making systematic policy reform difficult. However, the fact that prison populations have already begun to decline, combined with the emerging public will to reduce incarceration and dropping age-specific incarceration rates, promotes optimism in the decarceration agenda. Three issues remain to be resolved: the eventual target rate of incarceration, what to do with people convicted of violent crimes, and how to avoid the distracting focus on reentry programming. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 4 is January 13, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Political Economy of Attention

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Axel Pedersen ◽  
Kristoffer Albris ◽  
Nick Seaver
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Online Publication ◽  
The Political ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Political Economic

Attention has become an issue of intense political, economic, and moral concern over recent years: from the commodification of attention by digital platforms to the alleged loss of the attentional capacities of screen-addicted children (and their parents). While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important if mostly tacit part in many anthropological debates and subfields. Focusing on anthropological scholarship on digital worlds and ritual forms, we review resources for colleagues interested in this burgeoning topic of research and identify potential avenues for an incipient anthropology of attention, which studies how attentional technologies and techniques mold human minds and bodies in more or less intentional ways. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Inflation Inequality: Measurement, Causes, and Policy Implications

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xavier Jaravel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Income Distribution ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Optimal Taxation ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date

Does inflation vary across the income distribution? This article reviews the growing literature on inflation inequality, describing recent advances and opportunities for further research in four areas. First, new price index theory facilitates the study of inflation inequality. Second, new data show that inflation rates decline with household income in the United States. Accurate measurement requires granular price and expenditure data because of aggregation bias. Third, new evidence quantifies the impacts of innovation and trade on inflation inequality. Contrary to common wisdom, empirical estimates show that the direction of innovation is a significant driver of inflation inequality in the United States, whereas trade has similar price effects across the income distribution. Fourth, inflation inequality and non-homotheticities have important policy implications. They transform cost-benefit analysis, optimal taxation, the effectiveness of stabilization policies, and our understanding of secular macroeconomic trends—including structural change, the decline in the labor share and interest rates, and labor market polarization. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Economics, Volume 13 is August 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Recent Rise of Suicide Mortality in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Martínez-Alés ◽  
Tammy Jiang ◽  
Katherine M. Keyes ◽  
Jaimie L. Gradus
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Suicide Risk ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
Suicide Mortality ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Suicide Rates ◽  
Subsequent Decrease

Suicide is a major public health concern in the United States. Between 2000 and 2018, US suicide rates increased by 35%, contributing to the stagnation and subsequent decrease in US life expectancy. During 2019, suicide declined modestly, mostly owing to slight reductions in suicides among Whites. Suicide rates, however, continued to increase or remained stable among all other racial/ethnic groups, and little is known about recent suicide trends among other vulnerable groups. This article ( a) summarizes US suicide mortality trends over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, ( b) reviews potential group-level causes of increased suicide risk among subpopulations characterized by markers of vulnerability to suicide, and ( c) advocates for combining recent advances in population-based suicide prevention with a socially conscious perspective that captures the social, economic, and political contexts in which suicide risk unfolds over the life course of vulnerable individuals. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 43 is April 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

scholarly journals Social Inequality and the Future of US Life Expectancy

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iliya Gutin ◽  
Robert A. Hummer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Expectancy ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Population Health ◽  
The United States ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Extreme Longevity

Despite decades of progress, the future of life expectancy in the United States is uncertain due to widening socioeconomic disparities in mortality, continued disparities in mortality across racial/ethnic groups, and an increase in extrinsic causes of death. These trends prompt us to scrutinize life expectancy in a high-income but enormously unequal society like the United States, where social factors determine who is most able to maximize their biological lifespan. After reviewing evidence for biodemographic perspectives on life expectancy, the uneven diffusion of health-enhancing innovations throughout the population, and the changing nature of threats to population health, we argue that sociology is optimally positioned to lead discourse on the future of life expectancy. Given recent trends, sociologists should emphasize the importance of the social determinants of life expectancy, redirecting research focus away from extending extreme longevity and toward research on social inequality with the goal of improving population health for all. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

On the Interdependence of Liberal and Illiberal/Authoritarian Legal Forms in Racial Capitalist Regimes…The Case of the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McCann ◽  
Filiz Kahraman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
The United States ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Legal Forms

Scholars conventionally distinguish between liberal and illiberal, or authoritarian, legal orders. Such distinctions are useful but often simplistic and misleading, as many regimes are governed by plural, dual, or hybrid legal institutions, principles, and practices. This is no less true for the United States, which often is misidentified as the paradigmatic liberal constitutional order. Historical and critical scholarship, including recent studies of law under racial capitalism, provide reason to identify American law as a dual state in which legal forms that govern property ownership, contract relations, and civil liberties of free citizens differ from the more illiberal, authoritarian legal forms that rule over subaltern populations, particularly racialized, low-wage workers, Indigenous populations, the poor, immigrants, and women. This dual state, we argue, did undergo changes to adopt more procedurally liberal, professional, overtly deracialized legal forms after World War II, but these changes masked more than tamed the continuing illiberal, authoritarian violence that targeted marginalized citizens. While constantly changing, the American legal system is best understood not as a singular liberal order but instead as a hybrid system of mutually constitutive liberal and illiberal and authoritarian legal practices. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 17 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

scholarly journals A Critical Review of the Social and Behavioral Contributions to the Overdose Epidemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Cerdá ◽  
Noa Krawczyk ◽  
Leah Hamilton ◽  
Kara E. Rudolph ◽  
Samuel R. Friedman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Prescription Opioid ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Opioid Overdose ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Public Health

More than 750,000 people in the United States died from an overdose between 1999 and 2018; two-thirds of those deaths involved an opioid. In this review, we present trends in opioid overdose rates during this period and discuss how the proliferation of opioid prescribing to treat chronic pain, changes in the heroin and illegally manufactured opioid synthetics markets, and social factors, including deindustrialization and concentrated poverty, contributed to the rise of the overdose epidemic. We also examine how current policies implemented to address the overdose epidemic may have contributed to reducing prescription opioid overdoses but increased overdoses involving illegal opioids. Finally, we identify new directions for research to understand the causes and solutions to this critical public health problem, including research on heterogeneous policy effects across social groups, effective approaches to reduce overdoses of illegal opioids, and the role of social contexts in shaping policy implementation and impact. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 42 is April 1, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Local Labor Market Inequality in the Age of Mass Incarceration

2020 ◽  
pp. 003464462096602
Author(s):  
Luke Petach ◽  
Anita Alves Pena
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Incarceration Rate ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Level Data ◽  
White Poverty

We contend that the rise of mass incarceration in the United States can be framed through the lens of stratification economics, which views race- and class-based discrimination as a rational attempt on behalf of privileged groups to preserve their relative status and the material benefits which that status confers. Using the first (to our knowledge) local-level data set on incarceration rates by race, we explore the relationship between income inequality, poverty, and incarceration at the commuting zone level from 1950 to the present. Consistent with Michelle Alexander’s hypothesis that expansion of the penal system and the rise of “tough on crime” policy were efforts by privileged groups to drive a wedge into working-class political coalitions formed out of the Civil Rights Movement, we find that labor markets with greater inequality experienced larger increases in the overall incarceration rate. Furthermore, we find that relative rates of poverty play a key role in explaining differential effects of mass incarceration across race. Areas where White poverty rates were large relative to non-White poverty rates experienced no significant change in White incarceration, but an expansion of non-White incarceration. These findings have implications for policies related to economic and judicial systems.

Inequality and the Carceral State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Gottschalk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Institutionalism ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Penal Policy ◽  
Cross National ◽  
The Welfare State

Some of the most promising work on mass incarceration, the retributive turn in penal policy, and growing inequalities in the United States employs a historical institutional lens. This work has illuminated the origins of the carceral state and the possibilities for dismantling it, the sources of interstate and cross-national variations in penal policy, and the role of race, gender, and the transformation of the welfare state in the construction of the carceral state. Going forward, illumination of pressing political problems like the carceral state will require that historical institutionalism retain or resurrect some of the qualities that originally made it so distinctive—even if that cuts against the grain of the wider discipline of political science.

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