Suchergebnisse

By analysing long‐run trends in the courts' use of custodial sanctions, this paper compares the reasons for the limited success in diverting adult offenders from imprisonment by increasing the use of fines during the late 1950s and 1960s, and the subsequent replacement of fines by imprisonment as the range of alternatives to custody expanded. These changes are explained by the role of information and previous sentencing practices in reducing uncertainly in the sentencing environment, Additionally, it is argued that statutory limitations are insufficient to compel sentencers to change practices. The effects of the Criminal Justice Act 1982, with implications for the Criminal Justice Act 1988, on the sentencing of young adults are given as an illustration of this point.

Deeply rooted historical patterns allow us to make a correlation between imprisonment and unemployment and the marginalization of blacks. This paper examines the interrelationships among criminal activity, punishment, and cycles of the economic system based on the influence of political and economic forces on forming penal policies. The penal system is viewed as a device by which labor market fluctuations can be regulated. We examine differences between blacks and whites and between the North and the South to arrive at this paper's thesis: that race provides the link among economic cycles, employment, and crime.

Conventional wisdom about the criminal justice system suggests that extralegal factors such as race or employment status should not affect sentencing outcomes. In this paper we examine an alternative model of the relationship between imprisonment and unemployment and race. The model suggests that penal practices are shaped by the labor market conditions of a system of production and that prisons, as part of a larger set of institutions providing support for economically-dependent populations, help to regulate the most superfluous group of workers in the industrial economy of the Northern states of the United States—unemployed black workers who comprise a large fraction of the pool of "reserve" workers necessary for price stability and economic expansion. We find support for the structural model that links black imprisonment (and Northern imprisonment in general) to manufacturing output and black unemployment.

In The Growth of Incarceration in the United States, the National Research Council documents the large and persistent racial disparities in imprisonment that accompanied the more than quadrupling of the U.S. incarceration rate since the 1980s. Largely unnoticed by policy makers and opinion leaders in recent years is an unprecedented decrease in the number of African American women incarcerated at the same time that the number of white women in prison has grown to new heights. The result of these recent changes is a near convergence in black-white female incarceration rates from 2000 to 2016. In some states, the changes occurred abruptly and almost instantaneously. In other states, the convergence has been gradual. We find that changes in the population composition—the fraction of the population that is black—was the major contributor to the decline in the disparity among women. We also find that race-specific differences in drug overdose deaths stemming from the recent increases in opioid use lowered the disparity by increasing the white female imprisonment rate and lowering it for black women.