Search results

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Introduction: The Politics of U.S. Mass Incarceration -- History of Law-and-Order Politics -- Race and Crime -- Presidential Power and Leadership -- Chapter 2. President Johnson's Safe Streets: The First Federal Anti-Crime Entrepreneur -- Chapter 3. President Nixon's Crime and Drug Wars: Bleeding-Heart Liberals and Lawlessness -- Mandatory Minimum Sentencing -- Chapter 4. President Ford Goes Victims' Rights and President Carter Goes Soft on Crime -- President Jimmy Carter, "Soft on Crime" -- Chapter 5. President Reagan Declares All-Out War on Crime and Drugs -- Note -- Chapter 6. President George H. W. Bush Follows President Reagan's Lead -- Chapter 7. President Clinton's Three Strikes and You're Out -- Chapter 8. President George W. Bush: Homeland Security and the War on Terrorism -- Chapter 9. President Obama's New Law and Order: Illegal Immigration, Private Prisons, and Executive Orders -- Chapter 10. President Trump: Law and Order, Politics of Fear, Alternative Facts, and the Rule of Law -- Chapter 11. Conclusion: Choices at the Top, Devastating Repercussions at the Bottom -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author.

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to assess how incarcerations persist across the world. The focus is on 163 countries for the period 2010 to 2015. Design/methodology/approach - The empirical evidence is based on Generalised Method of Moments. In order to increase room for policy implications, the dataset is decomposed into sub-samples based on income levels, religious domination, openness to the sea, regional proximity and legal origins. Findings - The following main findings are established. Incarcerations are more persistent in low income, Christian-protestant and Latin American countries while comparative evidence is not feasible on the basis of landlockedness and legal origins owing to unfavorable postestimation diagnostic tests. Justifications for the comparative advantages and relevance of findings to theory-building in public economics are discussed. Practical implications - First, income levels matter in the persistence of incarcerations because low income nations vis-à-vis their high income counterparts, have less financial resources with which to prevent and deal with events like terrorism, political instability and violence that lead to incarcerations. Second, the intuition for religious domination builds on the fact that liberal societies can be more associated with incarcerations compared to conservative societies. The main theoretical contribution of this study to the literature is that we have built on empirical validity to provide theoretical justification as to why categorizing countries on the basis of selected fundamental characteristics determine cross-country variations in incarcerations. Such evidence is important for theory-building in public economics. Originality/value- It is important for policy makers to understand the persistence of incarcerations across nations because resources could be allocated to regions and countries, contingent on the relative importance of future incarceration tendencies.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and disproportionately imprisons minorities, particularly African-Americans. Research shows that incarceration has many impacts on the individuals and families affected. One important question is whether high rates of incarceration silence the voices of minority communities by discouraging voting, affecting the structure of the political system. We use county-level data from 2010-2018 to study the impact of incarceration on the voter turnout rate in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. We find that incarceration has an insignificant effect on voter turnout after controlling for other demographic variables. However, the impacts of incarceration may operate through other channels, impacting demographic characteristics such as income and education. Thus, further research is needed to determine the effects of mass incarceration on voter engagement.

After forty years of skyrocketing incarceration rates, there are signs that a new "decarceration era" may be dawning; the prison population has leveled off and even slightly declined. Yet, while each branch of government has taken steps to reduce the prison population, the preceding decades of mass incarceration have empowered interest groups that contributed to the expansion of the prison industry and are now invested in its continued growth. These groups, which include public correctional officers and private prison management, resist decarceration-era policies, and they remain a substantial obstacle to reform. This Article scrutinizes the incentives of these industry stakeholders in the new decarceration era. Drawing on interviews with a wide range of industry actors, it develops a "taxonomy of resistance" to identify how and why these actors resist reform efforts and uncovers understudied parallels between private and public prison stakeholders. This fine-grained analysis grounds the Article's recommendations for changes to compensation and assessment structures to better align industry incentives with decarceration-era goals. Ultimately, the future of the decarceration era is precarious but not doomed. The detailed incentives unearthed by this study demonstrate the significant hurdles facing emerging decarceration policies and the urgent challenge of accounting for, overcoming, and co-opting entrenched prison industry stakeholders.