Prison

About: Prison is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25120 publications have been published within this topic receiving 470474 citations. The topic is also known as: jail & gaol.

Who’s Using and Who’s Doing Time: Incarceration, the War on Drugs, and Public Health

Abstract: WITHOUT A PERSONAL connection, scientists, researchers, and those who set public policy rarely know the stories of those who are convicted of felony crimes and sentenced to prison: how they came to be convicted, whom they left behind, and what they went home to once released. But the consequences of their imprisonment—social, economic, political, and personal—are evidenced daily in every major city, suburban town, and rural hamlet. We aim to reframe the growth of the prison industrial complex and the war on drugs from the perspective of those incarcerated for nonviolent, drug-related crimes. By framing the issue this way, we . . .

Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History

Abstract: As the twentieth century came to a close and the twenty-first began, something occurred in the United States that was without international parallel or historical precedent. Between 1970 and 2010 more people were incarcerated in the United States than were imprisoned in any other country, and at no other point in its past had the nation’s economic, social, and political institutions become so bound up with the practice of punishment. By 2006 more than 7.3 million Americans had become entangled in the criminal justice system. The American prison population had by that year increased more rapidly than had the resident population as a whole, and one in every thirty-one U.S. residents was under some form of correctional supervision, such as in prison or jail, or on probation or parole. As importantly, the incarcerated and supervised population of the United States was, overwhelmingly, a population of color. African American men experienced the highest imprisonment rate of all racial groups, male or female. It was 6.5 times the rate of white males and 2.5 times that of Hispanic males. By the middle of 2006 one in fifteen black men over the age of eighteen were behind bars as were one in nine black men aged twenty to thirty-four. The imprisonment rate of African American women looked little better. It was almost double that of Hispanic women and three times the rate of white women.1 Despite the fact that ten times more Americans were imprisoned in the last decade of the twentieth century than were killed during the Vietnam War (591,298 versus 58,228), and even though a greater number of African Americans had ended up in penal institutions than in institutions of higher learning by the new millennium (188,500 more), historians have largely ignored the mass incarceration of the late twentieth century and have not yet begun to sort out its impact on the social, economic, and political evolution of the postwar period. That one can learn a great deal about a historical moment by more

The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony Records in the United States, 1948-2010.

Abstract: The steep rise in U.S. criminal punishment in recent decades has spurred scholarship on the collateral consequences of imprisonment for individuals, families, and communities. Several excellent studies have estimated the number of people who have been incarcerated and the collateral consequences they face, but far less is known about the size and scope of the total U.S. population with felony convictions beyond prison walls, including those who serve their sentences on probation or in jail. This article develops state-level estimates based on demographic life tables and extends previous national estimates of the number of people with felony convictions to 2010. We estimate that 3 % of the total U.S. adult population and 15 % of the African American adult male population has ever been to prison; people with felony convictions account for 8 % of all adults and 33 % of the African American adult male population. We discuss the far-reaching consequences of the spatial concentration and immense growth of these groups since 1980.

Risk as a Proxy for Race

Abstract: Today, an increasing chorus argues that risk-assessment instruments are a politically feasible way to resolve our problem of mass incarceration and reduce prison populations. In this essay, I argue against this progressive argument for prediction: using risk-assessment tools to decrease prison populations would unquestionably aggravate the already intolerable racial imbalance in our prison populations and will not address the real source of mass incarceration, namely the admissions process. Risk has collapsed into prior criminal history, and prior criminal history has become a proxy for race. This means that using risk-assessment tools, even for progressive ends, is going to significantly aggravate the already unacceptable racial disparities in our criminal justice system. Instead of turning to prediction, we need to address prison admissions. Recent evidence suggests that our carceral excess was not so much fueled by the length of sentences, as it was by the front end: new admissions. The real solution to mass incarceration, then, is not to cut short prison terms though prediction, but to reduce admissions to prison.