Prison Crowding and the Evolution of Public Policy

While crowding has been a persistent feature of the American prison since its invention in the nineteenth century, the last decade of crisis has brought more outspoken media investigations of prison conditions, higher levels of political and managerial turmoil, and a judiciary increasingly willing to bring the conditions of confinement under the scope of Eighth Amendment review. With the added incentive of severe budget constraints, liberals and conservatives alike now question whether this is any way to do business. Although crowding cannot be defined by quantitative measures alone, many institutions have far exceeded their limits of density according to minimum standards promulgated by the corrections profession. Some fall far below any reasonable standard of human decency. The results are costly, dangerous, and offensive to the public interest. Breaking the cycle of recurrent crisis requires considered efforts to address the decentralized, discretionary nature of sentence decision making and to link sentencing policies to the resources available to the corrections function. The demand to match policy with resources is simply a call for more rational policymaking. To ask for less is to allow the future of corrections to resemble its troubled past.