The Growth of Incarceration in the United States Exploring Causes and Consequences (2014) / Chapter Skim
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4 The Underlying Causes of Rising Incarceration: Crime, Politics, and Social Change
4 The Underlying Causes of Rising Incarceration: Crime, Politics, and Social Change
Pages 104-129
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From page 104... ...
The salient forces include social and political unrest following World War II, especially in the 1960s; a major electoral realignment as the Democratic Party divided over civil rights and other issues and as the Republican Party became competitive in the south for the first time since Reconstruction; a decades-long escalation in national crime rates beginning in 1961; and major transformations in urban economies that included the disappearance of many well-paid jobs for low-skilled workers. They also include distinctive features of American political institutions, including the election and partisan political appointment of judges and prosecutors, a winner-take-all two-party electoral system, and the use of ballot initiatives and referenda in some states to develop criminal justice policy.
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From page 105... ...
However, because of underlying differences in the social, political, economic, and institutional context, other Western countries did not respond to increased crime by adopting markedly harsher policies and laws.1 This chapter examines the conditions for the emergence of a criminal justice system characterized by harsh policies, practices, and laws and unprecedented high rates of incarceration: the beginnings in the 1940s of efforts made at the federal level to change criminal justice policies and practices nationally; a growing federal role in crime policy, the political impact of rising crime rates after 1961, the subsequent political and electoral realignment triggered by the civil rights movement, the wars on drugs declared by President Nixon and his successors, rising public anxiety about crime and the influence of racial factors on those attitudes, U.S. political 1 As discussed in Chapter 2, the U.S.
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From page 106... ...
. This proved important in the second half of the twentieth century as a growing number of politicians, policy makers, and other public figures chose to respond to the social and political turmoil that gripped the country from the 1940s to the 1970s and to the rise in crime rates in the 1960s by greatly expanding the nation's penal capacity.
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From page 107... ...
There is a long history in the United States of debates over criminal justice policy, often in relation to the issues of race and civil rights. To many African Americans and Mexican Americans, dramatic, often violent confrontations in the years immediately after World War II illustrated serious problems of bias on the part of police forces.
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From page 108... ...
However, all this legislative activity in the 1940s and 1950s deeply influenced how future discussions of law and order, crime, and the federal role in law enforcement would unfold. In advocating these measures, Truman and his allies helped establish a federal role in state and local law enforcement.
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From page 109... ...
Strom Thurmond -- began calling for even more law enforcement power in response to rising crime rates and the demands of blacks for greater rights in the cities to which they had migrated. In response to these pressures, the Johnson Administration reformulated the law-and-order problem and expanded federal support for crime policy.
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From page 110... ...
In 1965, Johnson also established the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Three years later, Congress enacted the controversial Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 in response to the commission's findings.
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From page 111... ...
The responses of politicians, policy makers, and other public figures to rising crime rates were political choices not determined by the direction in which the crime rate was moving. Certain features of the social, political, and institutional context at the time help explain why in the U.S.
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From page 112... ...
.8 The homicide rates in poor neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage often were many times higher than those in affluent urban neighborhoods. Before crime rates began their steep drop in the early 1990s, the homicide rate among young black men aged 18 to 24 was nearly 200 per 100,000, or about 10 times the rate for young white men and about 20 times the rate for the U.S.
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From page 113... ...
Many leading Republican candidates and office-holders began developing political strategies that used the crime issue to appeal to white racial anxieties in the wake of the burgeoning black power movement and the gains of the civil rights movement.9 Some liberals interpreted the rise in the crime rate that occurred in the 1960s-1970s as a less serious threat to public safety than it was being 9 See Appendix A for a supplementary statement by Ricardo Hinojosa on this sentence and other similar committee findings in this chapter.
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From page 114... ...
Indeed, some key liberals contended that the "crime problem" was predominantly a race and civil rights problem, suggesting that entrenched segregation had created black cultural dysfunction and social disorder that, among other things, contributed to higher crime rates in urban areas (Murakawa, forthcoming)
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From page 115... ...
Taken together, these developments helped foster a receptive environment for political appeals for harsher criminal justice policies and laws. So, too, did the escalation of clashes between protesters and law enforcement authorities during the 1960s and 1970s.
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From page 116... ...
Although there were many factors contributing to the rise in crime, this coincidence created an opportunity for claims that greater investment in social and other programs did not reduce crime. Some commentators argued that social programs actually contributed to rising crime rates by fostering a host of personal pathologies they claimed were the "real" roots of crime (O'Connor, 2008)
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From page 117... ...
. Although African Americans experienced the largest absolute increases in incarceration rates, there is evidence that the black community was divided in its support for tough crime control policy.
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From page 118... ...
The growing concentration of violence, drug addiction, and open-air drug markets in poor urban neighborhoods; disillusionment with government efforts to stem these developments; and widening class divisions among blacks help explain why some African American community leaders endorsed a causal story of the urban crisis that focused on individual flaws, not structural problems, and that singled out addicts and drug pushers as part of the "undeserving poor" who posed the primary threat to working- and middle-class African Americans (Fortner, 2013; Barker, 2009, p. 151; Gottschalk, forthcoming; Cohen, 1999; Dawson, 2011)
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From page 119... ...
. In New York City and elsewhere, black leaders called for tougher laws for drug and other offenses and demanded increased policing to address residents' demands that something be done about rising crime rates and the scourge of drug abuse, especially the proliferation of open-air drug markets and the use of illegal drugs such as heroin and then crack cocaine (Barker, 2009; Fortner, 2013; Forman, 2012)
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From page 120... ...
. The shift in public opinion was partly a consequence of the enactment of tough new federal drug laws in 1986 and 1988, spurred by reports that crack cocaine had been introduced into urban drug markets.
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From page 121... ...
Moreover, some evidence suggests that public officials and policy makers misperceive or oversimplify public opinion on crime, focusing on Americans' punitive beliefs but deemphasizing or 21 Although the Republican Party's southern strategy promoted harsher crime policy and the Republican administrations of Presidents Nixon and Reagan encouraged tougher drug enforcement and sentencing, the committee members varied in their views of the role played by Democratic Party policy makers in this process.
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From page 122... ...
. But racial indifference and insensitivity -- as distinguished from outright racial hostility -- may help explain the long-term public support for criminal justice policies that have had an adverse and disproportionate impact on blacks (and Latinos)
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From page 123... ...
. POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND CULTURE Trends in crime rates and public opinion had much larger effects on criminal justice policy in the United States, compared with other Western countries, because they interacted with and were filtered through specific institutional, cultural, and political contexts that facilitated the growth in incarceration.
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From page 124... ...
. Yet, despite taking hard-line positions on crime control, local governments often hire too few police officers (since cities and counties are responsible for paying nearly all local police budgets)
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From page 125... ...
The south, in contrast, tended to have small police forces, larger but highly variable prison populations, and high crime rates.* The west mimicked the south for most of the nineteenth century but came to resemble the northeast by century's end; as its police forces grew, crime rates shrank, and mob justice faded (Stuntz, 2011)
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From page 126... ...
Another factor was the establishment of powerful, effective, and well-funded lobbying groups to represent the interests of the growing corrections sector. The private prison industry and other companies that benefit from large prison populations have expended substantial effort and resources in lobbying for more punitive laws and for fewer restrictions on the use of prison labor and private prisons (Elk and Sloan, 2011; Thompson, 2010, 2012; Gilmore, 2007; Hallinan, 2001; Herival and Wright, 2007; Gopnik, 2012; Abramsky, 2007)
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From page 127... ...
, and the decline of organized labor and the contraction of well-paying manufacturing and other jobs in urban areas for low-skilled workers. Rising incarceration rates overall appear to be produced primarily by the increased imprisonment of uneducated young men, especially those lacking a college education (see Chapter 2)
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From page 128... ...
Although debates over crime policy have a long history in the United States, these various forces converged in the 1960s, which served as an important historical turning point for prison policy. Crime rates also increased sharply beginning in the 1960s, with the national homicide rate nearly doubling between 1964 and 1974.
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From page 129... ...
Unlike many other Western countries, the United States responded to escalating crime rates by enacting highly punitive policies and laws and turning away from rehabilitation and reintegration. The broader context provides a set of important explanations for both the punitive path that many politicians, policy makers, and other public figures decided to pursue and, perhaps more important, why so many Americans were willing to follow.
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