1. The prison and the gallows: the construction of the carceral state in America 2. Law, order, and alternative explanations 3. Unlocking the past: the nationalization and politicization of law and order 4. The carceral state and the welfare state: the comparative politics of victims 5. Not the usual suspects: feminists, women's groups, and the anti-rape movement 6. The battered women's movement and the development of penal policy 7. From rights to revolution: prison activism and penal policy 8. Capital punishment, the courts, and the early origins of the carceral state, 1920s-60s 9. The power to punish: the political development of capital punishment, 1972 to today 10. Conclusion: whither the carceral state.

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The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America

The expansion of the U.S. penal system has important consequences for poverty and inequality, yet little is known about the imposition of monetary sanctions. This study analyzes national and state‐level court data to assess their imposition and interview data to identify their social and legal consequences. Findings indicate that monetary sanctions are imposed on a substantial majority of the millions of people convicted of crimes in the United States annually and that legal debt is substantial relative to expected earnings. This indebtedness reproduces disadvantage by reducing family income, by limiting access to opportunities and resources, and by increasing the likelihood of ongoing criminal justice involvement.

https://faculty.washington.edu/kbeckett/articles/AJS.pdf

Drawing Blood from Stones: Legal Debt and Social Inequality in the Contemporary United States

We extend earlier analyses of the factors that explain differences among the U.S. states in imprisonment rates by demonstrating the importance of state culture and political arrangements to the explanation of imprisonment rates, and growth in those rates, for the years 1971–1991.

State prison populations and their growth, 1971–1991*

Research on race and punishment for crime has produced inconsistent findings. Most previous reviews of the literature have been focused primarily on the numerous methodological flaws that may give rise to such inconsistencies. In this paper I suggest that inconsistent or anomalous findings in this area of research may also result from problems of conceptualization and theory. More specifically, it is argued that the conflict perspective must be substantially revised to begin to account for various anomalies observed by empirical researchers. Such a need for revision is the consequence of both problems in the original formulation of the perspective and its oversimplification within the empirical literature. One of the most widely debated issues in the criminological literature is whether there is racial bias in the administration of justice. In addition to numerous empirical investigations, there have been efforts in recent years to review previous studies and to determine where the weight of the evidence lies (Green 1971; Hagan 1974; Hagan and Bumiller 1983; Hardy 1983; Kleck 1981; Spohn et al. 1981-82). As in other areas of social research, most studies of racial bias in the administration of justice involve black-white comparisons. Reviews of empirical investigations have shown a large number of these studies to report significantly greater rates and levels of punishment for blacks than for whites.1 Others report no significant differences between the races. Still others find that in certain instances, whites receive significantly more punishment for crime than do blacks (e.g., Bernstein et al. 1977; Bullock 1961; Gibson 1978; Levin 1972). This latter finding is often described as an anomaly or inconsistency given the theoretical model that has guided research on this topic. Released time to prepare this paper was provided by the R. J. Reynolds Foundation and by the National Science Foundation, Grant No. RII-8421196. I thank John Hagan, Michael Radelet, and anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Address correspondence to the author, Black Studies Program and Department of Sociology, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL 60680. ? 1987 The University of North Carolina Press

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2578525

Beyond Anomalies: Rethinking the Conflict Perspective on Race and Criminal Punishment

Since the pioneering work ofRusche and Kirchheimer (1939), the theoretical links between labor surplus and punishment have seen extensive development. Eleven of those links described here are mediated by economic, political, and ideological factors such as the value of labor, the systemic needs of capitalism, and the ideology of judges and their communities. The sophistication of theorizing about labor surplus and punishment is matched with skepticism about the corresponding empirical evidence which has been termed “elusive”and “contradictory” at best. The results from 44 empirical studies are systematically assessed. The evidence suggests that independent of the effects of crime, labor surplus is consistently and significantly related to prison population, and to prison admissions when time-series and individual level data are used. The relationship of labor surplus and punishment appears slightly stronger when age, race, and gender specific measures are employed. The limitations of existing research, in light of theoretical developments, are discussed.

Labor Surplus and Punishment: A Review and Assessment of Theory and Evidence

This paper identifies and analyzes the political and economic functions of the state penal systems in the southern United States after the Civil War. The system of prison administration, discipline, and labor which emerged after 1865—known as the convict lease system—was a functional replacement for slavery. Like the Black Codes, vagrancy laws, and sharecropping arrangements, the convict lease system was a mechanism of race control used to prevent ex-slaves from obtaining the status and rights enjoyed by wage workers. The organization and philosophy of crime control both before and after the Civil War reflected the fact that both slaves and ex-slaves were problem populations. As such, they were a threat to the existing system of class rule but also a useful resource—economically as a pool of cheap labor for southern industrialization, and politically or symbolically as a means to consolidate white supremacy.

Punishment after slavery: southern state penal systems, 1865-1890"*

This paper analyzes penology in the United States during the 19th century in terms of the business cycle and labor supply. A systematic theory of the economic functions of imprisonment can be constructed with reference to the interaction between the crime- and class-control strategies of prison reformers, prison administrators, and government officials, and their financial and industrial goals. I develop a theoretical model which links variations in prison discipline and prison labor policy to the processing of populations through the criminal justice system as both economic threats and economic resources. Using this model, I examine six periods of 19thcentury U.S. history and show that changes in business conditions and labor supply coincided with identifiable stages in the development of penology.

Christopher R. Adamson

Papers

Punishment after slavery: southern state penal systems, 1865-1890"*

Toward a Marxian Penology: Captive Criminal Populations as Economic Threats and Resources

The Breakdown of Canadian Prison Administration: Evidence from Three Commissions of lnquiry