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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.

The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world. We calculate that a reduction in incarceration rates just to the level we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards) would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year, with the large majority of these savings accruing to financially squeezed state and local governments. As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion. These cost savings could be realized through a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of exclusively non-violent offenders, who now make up over 60 percent of the prison and jail population. A review of the extensive research on incarceration and crime suggests that these savings could be achieved without any appreciable deterioration in public safety.

This paper draws on literary scholar Susan Ryan&rsquo ; s work to show how Americans worked out national as well as racial identities through benevolent activity, including forms of reformative incarceration. Reformers operated as true citizens by sustaining themselves and providing for others. Recipients, on the other hand, functioned as people in need. Ryan argues that benevolent activists ascribed need to entire groups of people. As a result, &ldquo ; the categories of blackness, Indianness, and Irishness&hellip ; came to signify need itself.&rdquo ; Elite Americans thereby &ldquo ; raced&rdquo ; need, assigning essential difference to populations they sought to relieve. Ryan&rsquo ; s work on racialized need can help us understand the connections between Christianity, race, and mass incarceration. I explore how one nineteenth-century military prison&mdash ; and the disciplinary institutions later modeled on it&mdash ; was created in direct response to presumed (and raced) need among Native Americans. I also consider how Christian reformers obscured and concealed the racialized nature of this institution&mdash ; and how, in that avoidance, they came to sanctify mass incarceration for racial minorities. Finally, I look at two incarcerated Native artists&rsquo ; drawings to show how people caught up in racialized renderings of their need have something else to say about who they are and what prison is.

Due to the criminalization of marginalized people, many markers of social disadvantage are overrepresented among prisoners. With an aging population, end of life in prison thus becomes a social justice issue that nurses must contend with, engaging with the dual suffering of dying and of incarceration. However, prison palliative care is constrained by the punitive mandate of the institution and has been critiqued for normalizing death behind bars and appealing to discourses of individual redemption. This paper argues that prison palliative has much to learn from harm reduction. Critical reflections from harm reduction scholars and practitioners hold important insights for prison palliative care: decoupled from its historical efforts to reshape the social terrain inhabited by people who use drugs, harm reduction can become institutionalized and depoliticized. Efforts to address the harms of substandard palliative care must therefore be interwoven with the necessarily political work of addressing the injustice of incarceration.

In 2014 the cultural agency of the United Nations issued a dismal assessment of education in Africa. The report noted that while, globally, a quarter of a billion children are failing to learn basic reading and math skills, resulting in an education crisis that costs governments $129 billion per year, the situation in Africa could only be described as catastrophic. Education on this continent had failed so miserably in its mission that 'four in 10 African children "cannot read a sentence"' (cited in Daily Nation 2014: 1). This equates to 40% of children, compared to 25% in other poor countries. The report attributed this situation to the fact that 'fewer than three-quarters of existing primary school teachers were trained to national standards, while 120 million primary age1 This paper was prepared as an invited keynote presentation in the Language Panel at the 10th Annual Conference on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 20-22 September, 2016. I thank Zehlia Babaci-Wilhite, Herman Batibo, Hatem A. Bazian, Langa Khumalo, Patricia Kwok, and David Kyeu, for comments. I am grateful to Jarvis Givens, Jessie Kabwila, Monica Kahumburu, William Kamkwamba, Pascal Kishindo, Wokomaatani Malunga, Francis Moto, Thoko Mtchona, Al Mtenje, John Mugane, Deo Ngonyani, and Matthews Sapemba Tisatayane, for discussions. Thanks to Judith Khaya and Renée Khaya for comments on education in Malawi. All views expressed are my own. In American Canyon, California, Flora Suya provided emotional support; Collin Domingo, José Flores, Savannah Garcia, Carole Lonzanida, Nicolas Rapacon, Scott Turnnidge, Teri Urrutia, and Vilma Wakin have always offered cheer when I needed friends.children across the world had little or no experience of school.' It concluded that the African education system does not equip the children with the desired literacy and math skills or scientific knowledge. However, it is silent on the role that language might play in attaining these goals and a well-rounded ...

The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration reexamines the history of imprisonment of U.S. and Canadian citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. Karen M. Inouye explores how historical events can linger in individual and collective memory and then crystallize in powerful moments of political engagement.

Similar to experiences of Indigenous peoples globally, Māori in the nation-state known as New Zealand (NZ) have been subjected to mass incarceration by the colonial state. Places of detention are dangerous environments for the spread of COVID-19. We are deeply concerned about the potential for disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on Māori and other Indigenous peoples within these environments as many have health conditions and/or multiple comorbidities compounding the risks of severe illness and death from COVID-19. We call for the NZ government to honour te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations and uphold Indigenous rights contained within the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other international rights instruments. A whole-of-government commitment to an equitable public health approach is required to: 1) rapidly reduce the numbers of Māori in sites of detention; 2) implement effective, timely, evidenced informed measures to reduce the risk of COVID-19, in line with World Health Organization recommendations; 3) prevent the torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detained Māori during COVID-19; and, 4) eliminate double-celling. Although focused on NZ, the themes we highlight are likely of relevance for Indigenous peoples across the globe in our collective resistance to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Previous research demonstrates that social support is essential for successful reentry into the community after incarceration. However, little research examines how incarceration itself impacts social support and how individuals with different incarceration histories have different experiences of social support. This dissertation examined how individuals' social networks, social support, and wellbeing are predicted by incarceration history. Formerly incarcerated men returning from jail and prison (N = 68) were interviewed in a procedure designed to collect information about their criminal justice histories, to map their social networks, to provide open-ended feedback about their reentry experience, and to collect a variety of other relevant demographic and scale measures. Analyses of the resulting data provided little evidence that an individual's most recent incarceration impacts their social network, social support, or wellbeing. However, conditions of individuals' previous and lifetime incarcerations did have significant predictive power. Individuals who were incarcerated for longer in prison in the past, incarcerated in any setting for longer in the past, incarcerated in any setting for longer throughout their lifetime, and/or incarcerated further from home throughout their lifetime were found to have less support available to them. Conditions of previous and lifetime incarceration also predicted alter closeness, the incarceration history of alters, and participant wellbeing. The relationships between previous and lifetime incarceration and these outcomes were not mediated by participants' prisonization or by their identification with people inside or people outside of prison and jail. Qualitative analyses provided additional information about support during reentry, including highlighting the physical and emotional distance created by incarceration, the important role that technology and social media plays in support after reentry, and the complicated nature of relationships with other individuals who have been incarcerated. These findings can be used by correctional facilities, probation and parole officers, and non-profit and government service providers to help determine which reentering individuals are least likely to have support and close network members, and which individuals are most likely to have a greater prevalence of formerly incarcerated network members and poor wellbeing. Providing these individuals with additional reentry services has the potential to reduce recidivism and increase public safety.

The major government commissions on immigration and crime in the early twentieth century relied on evidence that suffered from aggregation bias and the absence of accurate population data, which led them to present partial and sometimes misleading views of the immigrant-native criminality comparison. With improved data and methods, we find that in 1904, prison commitment rates for more serious crimes were quite similar by nativity for all ages except ages 18 and 19, for which the commitment rate for immigrants was higher than for the native-born. By 1930, immigrants were less likely than natives to be committed to prisons at all ages 20 and older, but this advantage disappears when one looks at commitments for violent offenses. The time series pattern reflects a growing gap between natives and immigrants at older ages, one that was driven by sharp increases in the commitment rates of the native-born, while commitment rates for the foreign-born were remarkably stable.

One of the ways by which the legal system has responded to different sets of problems is the blurring of the traditional boundaries of criminal law, both procedural and substantive. This study aims to explore under what conditions does this trend lead to the improvement of society's welfare by focusing on two distinguishing sanctions in criminal law, incarceration and social stigma. In analyzing how incarceration affects the incentive to an individual to violate a legal standard, we considered the crucial role of the time constraint. This aspect has not been fully explored in the literature on law and economics, especially with respect to the analysis of the beneficiality of imposing either a fine or a prison term. We observed that that when individuals are heterogeneous with respect to wealth and wage income, and when the level of activity can be considered a normal good, only the middle wage and middle income groups can be adequately deterred by a fixed fines alone regime. The existing literature only considers the case of the very poor, deemed as judgment proof. However, since imprisonment is a socially costly way to deprive individuals of their time, other alternatives may be sought such as the imposition of discriminatory monetary fine, partial incapacitation and other alternative sanctions. According to traditional legal theory, the reason why criminal law is obeyed is not mainly due to the monetary sanctions but to the stigma arising from the community's moral condemnation that accompanies conviction or merely suspicion. However, it is not sufficiently clear whether social stigma always accompanies a criminal conviction. We addressed this issue by identifying the circumstances wherein a criminal conviction carries an additional social stigma. Our results show that social stigma is seen to accompany a conviction under the following conditions: first, when the law coincides with the society's social norms; and second, when the prohibited act provides information on an unobservable attribute or trait of an individual -- crucial in establishing or maintaining social relationships beyond mere economic relationships. Thus, even if the social planner does not impose the social sanction directly, the impact of social stigma can still be influenced by the probability of conviction and the level of the monetary fine imposed as well as the varying degree of correlation between the legal standard violated and the social traits or attributes of the individual. In this respect, criminal law serves as an institution that facilitates cognitive efficiency in the process of imposing the social sanction to the extent that the rest of society is boundedly rational and use judgment heuristics. Paradoxically, using criminal law in order to invoke stigma for the violation of a legal standard may also serve to undermine its strength. To sum, the results of our analysis reveal that the scope of criminal law is narrow both for the purposes of deterrence and cognitive efficiency. While there are certain conditions where the enforcement of criminal law may lead to an increase in social welfare, particularly with respect to incarceration and stigma, we have also identified the channels through which they could affect behavior. Since such mechanisms can be replicated in less costly ways, society should first try or seek to employ these legal institutions before turning to criminal law as a last resort.

Public awareness of the injustices of mass incarceration has grown significantly over the last decade. Many people have learned about mass incarceration in church contexts through book groups, study campaigns, and denominational statements. In recent years, faith-based community organizing (FBCO) networks have increasingly turned their attention to mass incarceration in light of the growing awareness of many Christian individuals, congregations, and denominations. Mass incarceration, however, presents three distinctive challenges to FBCO. First, dismantling mass incarceration requires overtly and conscientiously confronting white supremacy and advancing racial and ethnic equity ; faith-based community organizers have avoided this work in the past for fear of dividing their base. Second, streams of Christian theology based in retributivism have provided justifications for increasingly punitive practices and policies, thus contributing to mass incarceration ; FBCO networks must construct and uplift alternative theological streams to support alternative practices and policies. Finally, several practices and policies tied to mass incarceration deplete the political power of individuals, families, and communities most deeply impacted by it. Organizing against mass incarceration requires new strategies for building social capital and creating coalitions among groups who have been disenfranchised, marginalized, and undercounted by these practices and policies. Together, these challenges have required FBCO networks to adapt assumptions, strategies, and relationships that had previously been effective in addressing other issues, such as healthcare, employment, education, and transportation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores the insights, struggles, and innovations of ISAIAH, a network in Minnesota, as its members work to dismantle mass incarceration and confront its unique challenges.

This paper discusses the systematic biases that follow ex-felons after their release from imprisonment and then parallels this disenfranchisement with the mistreatment of free blacks during the Jim Crow era. It begins by outlining the political, economic and social fabrics ex-felons face through biased housing policies, employment discrimination, lack of public services and educational support, and exemption from politics. Similarly, during Jim Crow free blacks were disregarded in the political and economic realm and socially targeted through fear inducing tactics, such as lynching, due to their perceived threat to the hegemonic powers. I argue, ex-felons and free blacks had their rights revoked and were removed from being active participants in society, ultimately leading to a negative sense of self and the acceptance of their "lower caste" position.

This is a reflection about teaching first year undergrads at an elite private institution in a predominantly white rural area about blackness and the prison industrial complex in a "writing intensive" course through the use of open letters and the politicization of vulnerability.

A large theoretical literature in sociology connects increasing rates of incarceration to contractions in the labor market. But evidence for the economic causes of incarceration is mixed. We use a shock to the southern agricultural labor market to study the political economy of incarceration in the U.S. South in the early twentieth century. From 1915 to 1920, a beetle called the boll weevil spread across the state of Georgia, causing cotton yields and the prevalence of tenant farming to fall. Using archival records of incarceration in Georgia, we find that the boll weevil infestation increased the rate at which African Americans were admitted to prison for property crimes. The effects for whites and for prison admissions for homicide were much smaller and not statistically significant.