History of Prison Systems

In recent decades, growth in the number of people in U.S. prisons has been the largest in history—the prison population increased by more than one million between 1980 and 2000. To accommodate this growth, corrections officials have pursued a variety of strategies, including greatly expanding the network of prisons. The number of state prison facilities increased from about 600 prisons in the mid-1970s to over 1,000 prisons by the year 2000. Because the Census Bureau counts prisoners where they are incarcerated in the decennial census, the locations of prisons may have significant implications for stateand federal funding allocations, as well as political representation. Despite this tremendous growth, the prison construction boom has received relatively little attention. It is remarkable that a public undertaking as far-reaching as the American prison expansion, which affects millions of incarcerated individuals, influences millions more family and community members, and consumes billions of public dollars, would receive so little empirical analysis and public scrutiny. This report contributes to the limited knowledge base by developing an empirical understanding of the geographic locations of prison facilities—and therefore prisoners—following this record-level expansion over the past two decades. Prison expansion is examined from national, state, and county-level perspectives, and in terms of the extent to which prisons were located in “metro” counties or “non-metro” counties. This report focuses on 10 states that experienced the largest growth in the number of prisons during the 1980s and 1990s. Several themes emerge from the analyses presented in this report. First is the pervasiveness of prison growth. The prison construction boom of the last two decades was not concentrated in a few states or in certain regions of the country, but occurred in states across the country. Prison systems also expanded within states, as new prisons were more geographically dispersed. The share of counties in the 10 study states that were home to at least one prison increased from 13 percent of counties in 1979 to 31 percent of counties in 2000. In addition, the number of prisons increased significantly in both metro and non-metro counties, challenging the notion that prison expansion has primarily taken place in non-metro counties. A second theme to emerge is that in a select number of smaller communities, prison expansion has significantly impacted the total population. In each of the 10 study states there were several counties where a notable share of the total population was incarcerated. Thirteen counties in the 10 study states had 20 percent or more of the resident population imprisoned in 2000. All 10 states had least five counties where 5 percent or more of the population was imprisoned. Not surprisingly, most of these counties, but not all, were non-metro counties. Analyses presented in this report show that the share of prisoners who resides in non-metro counties is greater than the share of the general population who resides in non-metro counties, and that this has been the case for at least the last two decades. A third theme of this report is the mismatch between the places prisoners consider home and the places prisoners serve their time. A series of maps illustrates large disparities between the sentencing counties and the counties of imprisonment. Issues related to prison expansion of the 1980s and 1990s are numerous and complex. We hope that this report 1) provides a better understanding of this expansion in terms of spatial distribution, 2) challenges some commonly held ideas about prison growth, and 3) highlights issues that deserve additional attention. Our primary goal, however, is to use empirical analyses to ground the debate surrounding prison expansion and to lay the foundation for future studies.

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2000

Neoliberal ideology has driven privatization across the globe steadily since the 1970s, advocating that the only way to meet macroeconomic objectives is to privatize public enterprise (Schmitt Journal of Public Policy, 31(1), 95, 1). As a result, market-like mechanisms are now embedded into what was traditionally public domain; this is the context under which immigration enforcement currently operates. Our previous research study showed the prison industrial complex is now also involved in immigration detention as a result of rigorous lobbying, policymaking, managing private contracts, and in the running of immigration detention centers themselves. We add to this line of research by suggesting that the ability of private actors to push for a more securitized state, due to their profit motive, results in a distortion of securitization that negatively impacts the groups it disproportionately targets, such as Latinos, immigrants, and Muslims in the U.S. Our research question is, what is the social and political impact of securitization of immigration in the U.S. on racial, ethnic minorities and immigrants? To do so, we turn to the existing lines of inquiry on prison privatization, its role in growing mass incarceration (due to profit motive), and its social and political effects on minorities in the U.S. because we believe these research areas overlap in a number of ways. Then, we run a series of quantitative analyses using hierarchical regression models to test nationally representative data from 2013 and compare our dependent variables measuring social and political elements across different social groups; our findings show that Latinos and immigrants in the U.S., which represent the groups most vulnerable to securitization, are worse off compared to whites and African Americans, even when controlling for education, income, and age in both social and political aspects.

Valparaiso University Law Review, 2014

Abstract - Objective: This study is an overview of the most current state of the US prison system relative to incarcerated women, focusing specifically on the risks of HIV and opportunistic diseases that affect women’s health and lacking concerted interest in understanding and addressing women’s specific needs by policy-makers and managers of our prison facilities. Methodology: Conducted by an interdisciplinary team of socio-behavioral scientists in epidemiology, social work, policy, and education, the study relies on the most updated research data provided by federal and state government agencies, hospital registries, biomedical, public health, and socio-behavioral databases, relevant and peerreviewed research studies published in journals and other accepted information sources, using a comparative national and global approach to the subject of female prisoners and the impact of infectious diseases. Conclusions: This study confirms, strengthens, and validates many previous less def...

47 Valparaiso University Law Review 709, 2013

Law & Society Review