Criminology & Public Policy 10(3)

Special Issue on Mass Incarceration

The past, present, and future of mass incarceration in the United States
Marie Gottschalk

Monetary Sanctions As Misguided Policy

On cash and conviction
Katherine Beckett and Alexes Harris

Substantial fees and fines now are now routinely imposed by courts and other criminal justice agencies across the United States. This article summarizes research on the imposition of monetary sanctions in the United States and shows how they differ from European day fines. In the contemporary United States, court-imposed legal financial obligations supplement other criminal penalties in the majority of felony and misdemeanor cases. Judges impose many fees and fines at their discretion, and evidence from Washington State indicates that extralegal factors–including ethnicity–influence their assessment. Many states have also authorized jails, departments of correction, and probation offices to levy fees. In the United States, fees and fine amounts are determined by statute and are not tethered to defendants’ earnings. Recent studies suggest that the assessment of these penalties often generate long-term debts that are sizeable relative to expected earnings and impede reintegration.

This essay contends that the disadvantages of the widespread and discretionary imposition of substantial and supplementary financial penalties outweigh any benefits associated with this practice. Proponents of correctional and court fees argue that offenders—not taxpayers—should pay for the cost of punishing their misdeeds. The idea that offenders should foot the bill for criminal justice expenditures is a moral and political claim, one that likely has broad appeal. Nonetheless, this claim is in tension with at least two other important principles. First, public criminal law systems rest on the premise that crime is mainly a wrong against the state; violations of criminal law are thought to be significant enough to warrant the state's usurpation of the dispute resolution process. Compelling defendants to reimburse the state for its criminal justice expenditures is in tension with this principle. Moreover, unlike users of other services for which fees are assessed, penal targets are compelled to partake of these services; they cannot use fewer of them or look for an alternative provider of them. It can be argued that if the state compels penal targets to use (often expensive and ineffective) state “services,” then the government is obligated to pay for them. Indeed, this fiscal obligation is arguably an important check on government power.

Fixing the Broken System of Financial Sanctions
Traci R. Burch

Politicizing the case for fines
Pat O’Malley

A new punishment regime
Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Mitali Nagrecha

The abolition of fines and fees
R. Barry Ruback

Justice Reinvestment

A private-sector, incentives-based model for justice reinvestment
Todd R. Clear

Justice reinvestment is a recent strategy designed to reduce the use of incarceration and divert the savings to improve the circumstances of communities that have high incarceration rates. More than a dozen states have mounted justice reinvestment projects. While support for justice reinvestment remains high, actual results have been mixed. In particular, the “community reinvestment” aspect of justice reinvestment has been disappointing. An approach that focuses on the private sector and creates incentives for private justice reinvestment could resolve some of these current limitations of the method.

Advocates for justice reinvestment would be able to address some of the problems in the approach by developing financial incentives that involve the private sector in justice reinvestment activity.

Encouraging innovation on the foundation of evidence
James H. Burch, II

Justice reinvestment and the use of imprisonment
Rob Allen

Making imprisonment unprofitable
James Austin

Making peace, not a desert
Michael Tonry

Justice reinvestment in community supervision
Mark A. R. Kleiman

Lessons for justice reinvestment from restorative justice and the justice model experience
Shadd Maruna

American Penal Overindulgence

Mass incarceration, legal change, and locale
Mona Lynch

In this article, I have three major aims. First, I examine in detail the role that changes to legal policies and practice have played in the rise of mass incarceration. I look at four distinct aspects of legal change and argue that the law (and legal change) in these varied forms is the engine that has driven prison growth and, therefore, must be addressed in explanations of this phenomenon. This discussion leads to my second major goal, which is to move beyond national-level explanations of American mass incarceration and call for a more unified empirically based understanding that highlights the localized social, cultural, and political factors that have contributed to the imprisonment explosion. I conclude by exploring how this kind of theorization provides a road map to a more localized policy reform strategy that aims to reduce our reliance on incarceration.

Addressing the political environment shaping mass incarceration
Marc Mauer

Leaving mass incarceration
Karol Lucken

Putting politics in penal policy reform
Heather Schoenfeld

The local and the legal (pages 725–732)
Lisa L. Miller

Prison Officer Unions

Prison Officer Unions and the Perpetuation of the Penal Status Quo
Joshua Page

An unintended consequence of mass imprisonment is the growth of prison officer unions. This article shows how successful corrections unions in states like California and New York obstruct efforts to implement sentencing reforms, shutter prisons, and slash corrections budgets. They impede downsizing-oriented reforms by generating or exacerbating fear among voters and politicians. Policy makers in key states must overcome resistance from prison officer unions to downscale prisons. Through a combination of accommodation and confrontation, policy makers can relax opposition from the officer organizations and undertake prison downsizing efforts without busting the unions.

Downsizing the carceral state
Heather Ann Thompson

American imprisonment and prison officers’ unions
Anthony N. Doob and Rosemary Gartner

Mass Imprisonment and Childhood Behavior Problems

Mass imprisonment and racial disparities in childhood behavioral problems
Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman

This essay provides estimates of the influence of mass imprisonment on racial disparities in childhood well-being. To do so, we integrate results from three existing studies in a novel way. The first two studies use two contemporary, broadly representative data sets to estimate the effects of paternal incarceration on a range of child behavioral and mental health problems. The third study estimates changes in Black–White disparities in the risk of paternal imprisonment across the 1978 and 1990 American birth cohorts. Our research demonstrates the following: (1) The average effect of paternal incarceration on children is harmful, not helpful, and consistently in the direction of more mental health and behavioral problems. (2) The rapid increase in the use of imprisonment coupled with significant racial disparities in the likelihood of paternal (and maternal) imprisonment are linked to large racial disparities in childhood mental health and behavioral problems. (3) We find that mass imprisonment might have increased Black–White inequities in externalizing behaviors by 14–26% and in internalizing behaviors by 25–45%.

Our results add to a growing research literature indicating that the costs associated with mass imprisonment extend far beyond well-documented impacts on current inmates. The legacy of mass incarceration will be continued and worsening racial disparities in childhood mental health and well-being, educational attainment, and occupational attainment. Moreover, the negative effects of mass imprisonment for childhood well-being are likely to remain, even if incarceration rates returned to pre-1970s levels. Our results show that paternal incarceration exacerbates child behavioral and mental health problems and that large, growing racial disparities in the risk of imprisonment have contributed to significant racial differences in child well-being. The policy implications of our work are as follows: (1) Estimates of the costs associated with the current scale of imprisonment are likely to be severely underestimated because they do not account for the significant indirect effects of mass incarceration for children, for families, and for other social institutions such as the educational system and social service providers. (2) Policies that reduce incarceration rates for nonviolent offenders with no history of domestic violence will most dramatically reduce the effects of mass incarceration on childhood racial inequality. More research is needed to detail other important factors (e.g., crime type, criminal history, or gender of parent) that condition the effect of paternal incarceration on children. (3) Paternal incarceration effects target the most disadvantaged and vulnerable of children and are likely to result in long-term behavioral health problems. We propose a strengthening of the social safety net—especially as it applies to the poorest children—and programs that address the complicated needs of children of incarcerated parents.

The incarceration ledger
Robert J. Sampson

Is the devil in the details?
Candace Kruttschnitt

Taking children into account
Megan Comfort, Anne M. Nurse, Tasseli McKay and Katie Kramer

The consequences of incarceration
Michael Massoglia and Cody Warner

Countering the carceral continuum
Carla Shedd


Criminology & Public Policy, August 2011: Volume 10, Issue 3