Crime, Law Enforcement, and Sentencing in an Era of Prison Expansion

This chapter shows that rates of crime and arrest cannot explain the huge increase in prison population but that the extreme growth in prison admissions indicates that behavior of local criminal justice agencies, prosecutors, and courts was the dynamic force that accounts for most of the prison population explosion.

The Whiteness of Watching

This article seeks to develop a concept I term surveillant citizenship, referring to a historically-emergent civic national and moral discourse that prescribes citizen participation in surveillance, policing, and law enforcement. Drawing on philosophy of race, surveillance studies, critical prison studies, and cultural theory, I argue that the ideological projects attached to the ‘War on Crime’ and the ‘War on Drugs’ sought to choreograph white social life around surveillant citizenship—manufacturing consent to police militarization, prison expansion, and mass incarceration, with consequences relevant to the future of antiracist strategy.

‘The better way to fight crime’: Why fiscal arguments do not restrain the carceral state

In recent years, actors from across the political spectrum concerned about the expansion of the US carceral state have pointed to the fiscal impacts of incarceration in a time of public austerity. A new regime of public policies pledging to be ‘smart on crime’ has taken root as a result. Advocates of such policies operate on the assumption that fiscal arguments will shift the trajectory of prison expansion because commitments to austerity will override the costly ‘tough on crime’ regime that has driven prison expansion in the USA over the last 40 years. This article reverses this assumption through a consideration of state-level policy in Oregon, a state that has formally embraced a commitment to fiscal restraint and ‘justice reinvestment’ as a strategy to limit prison growth. Our historical analysis reveals that since statehood, commitments to austerity and taxpayer protection have always framed criminal justice policy debates. Understood from this perspective, the story is not that prison reform advocates have discovered a new framework (‘smart on crime’) to restrain prison growth. It is that the longstanding discourse and politics of fiscal austerity has come to incorporate and absorb a portion of the anti-prison movement itself. That is fiscal arguments for prison reform are fully commensurate with the logic that drove mass incarceration in the first place. As a result, the state’s prison population has continued to expand even in the era of ‘smart on crime’ policymaking because commitments to fiscal austerity have not fundamentally challenged the policies and discourses that fueled the initial prison boom in the state. As most prisoners in the USA continue to be confined in state institutions, the analysis of state-level policy development in this article offers important insights into ongoing political debates over decarceration.

Invested in Prisons: Prison Expansion and Community Development in Canada

This paper critically examines the claim made by Canadian Conservative politicians that prison expansion is likely to produce economic gains for Canadian prison towns. Such claims raise many questions about the actual beneficiaries of prison construction, and the depiction of prisons as “infrastructure” serving some public good or even promoting social justice. After reviewing relevant literature from American debates on this topic, I focus on more specific Canadian conditions, and use public tendering data to trace the path of prison spending. The evidence suggests that prison expansion is unlikely to benefit surrounding communities, although interests elsewhere tend to reap major gains.

The Wrexham Titan prison and the case against prison expansion

The building of a new 'super prison' in Wrexham, North Wales has begun amidst a wider expansion of the penal industrial complex. Campaigns are mobilising nationally and locally against the project. This article examines the concerns surrounding what will become the United Kingdom's largest prison and argues that its construction is a symptom of a wider ideological attack on marginalised groups while also examining the case against prison expansion.

MAKING PUNISHMENT PAY

Sociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative and quantitative data from California, circa 1960–2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging of debt overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment and resistance to paying taxes for building prisons. The leveraging of bond debt deferred and externalized the costs of building prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged and extended this debt and dispensed with the requirement for direct voter approval. A Republican-dominated punishment regime capitalized debt to build prisons in selected exurban Republican California counties with growing visible minority populations. We demonstrate that the innovative use of lease revenue bonds was the essential element that enlarged and extended funding of California prison construction by an order of magnitude that made this expansion a boom. With what Robert Merton called the consequences of imperious interest, this prison expansion enabled the imprisonment of an inordinately large and racially disproportionate inmate population.