Baker, Vannesa - Imprisonment and The Democratic Process

Imprisonment and the Democratic Process
The Politics of Imprisonment: How the

Democratic Process Shapes the Way America
Punishes Offenders
Vanessa Barker
Print publication date: 2009

Print ISBN-13: 9780195370027
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2009
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195370027.001.0001

Vanessa Barker (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195370027.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter identifies the chronic long‐term differences in American penal
sanctioning, highlighting unexplained subnational imprisonment variation. It
asks why the American states established different kinds of penal regimes when
faced with similar kinds of policy problems of the late 1960s and 1970s: high
crime, social unrest, war, declining trust and confidence in government. It
argues that the way Americans engage in the democratic process shapes the
way America punishes criminal offenders. When we see variation in democratic
process, we are likely to see variation in penal sanctioning. It also links penal
regime variation to the discourse on crime control that is rooted in the cultural
tools and schemas of particular places rather than uniform or generalized
trends. It introduces the case studies of California, Washington State, and New
York.
Keywords: penal sanctioning, democratic process, political institutions, collective agency, crime
control, crime control discourse, subnational imprisonment variation, path dependencies, case studies,
penal regimes
The Transformation of U.S. Imprisonment

Punishment in America has radically changed over the past thirty years. The
United States has increased its reliance on confinement to unprecedented levels,
imprisoning more people than ever before and for longer periods of time in
rather austere prison conditions. Today, there are over two million people in
prison or jail, a historic record, and a 500 percent increase in the incarceration
rate since the early 1970s.1 One of every 100 adults is currently imprisoned, a
rate that is five to seven times that of other advanced industrial democracies
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such as France, Germany, and Sweden and a figure that surpasses Russia and
South Africa, countries with comparatively high incarceration rates.2 Across
much of the United States, rehabilitation, the underlying principle of
punishment, has been replaced by retribution as many policy makers, politicians,
and correctional officials have given up efforts to reform inmates and instead
simply punish them, sometimes quite harshly.
The poor, undereducated, unemployed, and racial and ethnic minorities have
been especially hard hit by these policies, often with long‐lasting consequences.
African Americans and Latinos make up about half the prison population despite
their smaller proportion in the general population. Problems with prisoner
“reentry” into (p.4) mainstream society—difficulties with employment,
marriage, child care, education—have tended to further alienate ex‐offenders
and destabilize community life for their families and neighbors.3 Such heavy
reliance on imprisonment over the years has not only driven up the cost of
government in a time of growing budgetary crisis but has created intractable
social problems for the entire country.
State‐Level Variation
What is less well known is how the individual American states contributed to this
massive prison build‐up and how some states confounded this trend. The United
States does not have a uniform nor coherent punishment policy because all
criminal justice policy is a subnational responsibility. Individual states tend to
punish differently from one another and punish in ways that have not been fully
documented, understood, or explained.
First, consider varying state‐level imprisonment rates. Currently, Louisiana

imprisons over 800 inmates per 100,000 population, Texas nearly 700, and
Mississippi just over 700.4 These stunning figures, substantially higher than the
national average of 447, tower over the rates of Maine and Minnesota (159 and
181, respectively), states with the lowest imprisonment rates in the country. The
gross disparities in imprisonment rates cannot all be explained away by varying
crime rates. Many states with high crime rates tend to have high imprisonment
rates, but this not a fixed relationship. Some states with low crime rates also
have high imprisonment rates. Mississippi, for example, ranks thirty‐first in
violent crime but third in the nation in imprisonment rates. Others, like New
York, with relatively high crime rates (until very recent years) have created
bifurcated imprisonment rates, high for certain crimes and low for others. New
York imprisons drug and violent offenders at relatively high rates but
simultaneously diverts and paroles nonviolent offenders, practices that support a
surprisingly moderate imprisonment rate of 322.
Second, the intensity and character of penal sanctioning varies dramatically

from place to place. Some states have embraced the full force of penal
sanctioning, instituting policies and practices designed to humiliate and degrade
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offenders, to use James Whitman's apt terminology. Some, like Arizona, have
reintroduced modern‐day chain gains, complete with antiquated striped prison
garb and public road crews. In Louisiana, the Angola (p.5)
prison sits on a former plantation

and deploys extensive prison
labor, reviving “days gone by” with
white correction officers on
horseback overseeing
predominantly black inmates in
the fields.5 In Texas, the death
house at Huntsville is so
overworked that many longtime
staffers have quit, and the warden, Figure 1.1. Subnational imprisonment
once a solid supporter of capital rates, selected U.S. states, 2007.
punishment, has reconsidered his
views.6
Less sensational but no less intense, some states have adopted a set of policies
and practices that mandate prison terms instead of probation for first‐time
offenders, lengthen prison terms, create severe penalties for specific crimes, and
eliminate early release from prison. California's “three strikes and you're out”
law, for example, significantly increased prison sentences for repeat offenders
and created a twenty‐five years to life mandatory sentence for third‐time felony
offenders, including nonviolent offenders. California's indiscriminate
imprisonment of first‐time offenders, parole violators, and repeat violent
offenders—its “wide net”—has driven up imprisonment rates, placing this once
liberal state fifteenth in the nation with its rate of 471 inmates per 100,000
population.
At the same time, however, some states have bucked this punitive trend. Some
have developed policies that reduce the intensity of penal sanctioning. Some
have even pursued a quiet policy of de‐escalation, seeking to reduce state
reliance on confinement through diversion and other means. Washington State,
for example, relies extensively on community sanctions, penal sanctions that
tend to depress imprisonment rates as offenders are diverted from prison to
noncarceral settings. Washington currently imprisons (p.6) about 273 inmates
per 100,000, ranking forty‐first in the nation. Like Washington, Oregon tends to
favor community sanctions over imprisonment with nearly three times the
number of offenders in community supervision compared to prison.7 Ohio has
initiated similar policies through sentencing guidelines reform, which promotes
community sanctions for nonviolent offenders.8
Many other states have recently tried to lessen the severity of punishment by
decreasing prison terms. Eighteen states, including Connecticut, Indiana,
Delaware, Michigan, Missouri, and Louisiana, have either abolished or reduced
their mandatory minimum prison terms for low‐level nonviolent offenders.9
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North Dakota, Mississippi, Maine, Colorado, Maryland, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon,

Montana, and Hawaii have instituted similar penal reforms.10
In the 1980s and 1990s, prison construction could barely keep pace with new
admissions to prison. Today, many states have halted prison construction and
have either consolidated or closed entire facilities. Some states have been forced
to do so in response to major budget cuts, but others have actively sought to
reduce their prison populations for political and social reasons. California,
Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, and Virginia have either consolidated or closed
prisons.
Variation in penal sanctioning is not only significant across the American states
but is substantial within individual states. Many states often lack internal
consistency in punishment, deploying a wide range of penal sanctions, using
both structured and unstructured sentencing, and mismatching penal
philosophies (e.g., rehabilitation and retribution). Some states may promote stiff
criminal penalties on the front end but generous early release policies on the
back end. Some manage to use both indeterminate and determinate sentencing,
fixing penalties for certain crimes but not others. Some may tout the
rehabilitative ideal but simply warehouse inmates. Others may promote more
“progressive” policies but are merely refashioning state coercion under
friendlier names: community sanctions, substance abuse treatment, and prisoner
reentry programs.
American penal sanctioning is fragmented, multidimensional, and often

contradictory. It is an odd mix of policies and practices that are ad hoc, reactive
to current events, and sometimes the result of long‐term planning. The reality of
American penal sanctioning is much more complicated, uneven, and obscure
than the discussion of national trends allows.
(p.7) Comparing Penal Regime Variation in Three Cases

This book seeks to document and explain variation in American penal
sanctioning. It is an important empirical pattern that has been downplayed in
the existing literature in its attempt to identify and explain general trends.11
This study compares the ways in which three American states, California,
Washington, and New York, developed their distinctive penal regimes in the late
1960s and early 1970s, a critical period in the history of U.S. crime control
policy. A penal regime includes the discourse on crime, conceptualizations of
justice, the rational for punishment, the character and type of sanctions, and
imprisonment rates. At this juncture, Washington introduced the principle of
parsimony, relying on the least repressive sanctions possible; whereas California
pursued retribution, more punitive and mandatory penal sanctions; and New
York adopted managerialism, sorting certain offenders into prison and diverting
others away.
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What is puzzling here is why the states did not pursue the same kind of policies
in response to the same kinds of policy problems. Each faced a historic rise in
crime, increases that quickly overloaded criminal justice systems around the
country and called into question the rehabilitative ideal. For nearly eighty years,
most states had tried to follow a rehabilitative approach to crime, a penal
philosophy that assumed crime was caused by social deprivation rather than
moral depravity and required the treatment and correction of offenders' failed
socialization. This crisis in criminal justice took place within the context of major
social change that further undermined the public's confidence and trust in
government to handle pressing social problems. The rise of a youth
counterculture, antiwar demonstrators, contentious racial politics, and a
backlash against the welfare state not only overturned traditional social
hierarchies and social norms but also challenged state authority.
Given these conditions, we might have expected state governments to respond

to rising crime and growing social unrest with repression, a uniformly harsh
response. Weakened political authorities tend to rely on repression to
temporarily restore social order during times of uncertainty and social
disintegration.12 But many American states did not do so in any consistent way.
It is critical to examine this early period because these initial changes help
explain the chronic long‐term differences in penal sanctioning we continue to
see across the American states, despite the national upward trend in (p.8)
imprisonment. Understanding the past can be a useful way to explain the
present. If we want to understand why recent efforts to reform California's three
strikes laws failed, why Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's much publicized
Public Safety and Offender Rehabilitative Service Act may be a hollow reform,
how Washington State muted the effects of its three strikes laws and prioritized
diversion, or how New York has managed to shut down prison facilities and
reform its drug laws, we need to understand the ongoing and cumulative effects
of the past on current events. Past decisions and past policies have created
resilient path dependencies that direct and shape contemporary penal
sanctioning in each state. Consider that Washington has kept its imprisonment
rates relatively low, California has had relatively high imprisonment rates, and
New York has maintained moderate imprisonment rates, consistently hovering
around the national average despite the state's infamous drug laws (see Figures
1.1, 1.2).13 Figure 1.2 illustrates the long‐term trends in imprisonment rates in
the cases and the national average. It shows the secular upward trend across the
cases since the 1970s and highlights the chronic long‐term differences we see
today.
In addition, these particular states may tell us something important about

punishment in the other states because they are representative of broader
Page 5 of 25
trends in American penal sanctioning and deeper trends in American democracy,

discussed shortly.
(p.9) Explaining Penal

Regime Variation: The
Democratic Process
This book is about the way
Americans engage in the
democratic process and how the
democratic process shapes the
way the nation punishes
criminal offenders. Criminal law
and penal sanctions can be
explained by the logic of Figure 1.2. Long‐term trends and
collective action, rather than imprisonment rates in the cases, 1971–
the logic of supply and demand. 2007.
Penal sanctions are the result of
deliberate policy choices rather
than automatic responses to crime. More crime does not mean more
imprisonment, just as more homelessness does not mean more housing.
Societies make choices about how and why they punish, choices that are bound
up in changing historical conditions and cultural and political processes. People
struggle over the meaning and causes of crime, and they struggle over the ways
states should respond to criminal violations. These struggles are embedded in
broader conflicts over the meaning and practices of democracy.
Informed by political sociology, particularly the work of Theda Skocpol and

Robert Putnam, this book develops an analytical framework of the democratic
process based on two theoretically and empirically significant features: political
structures and collective agency.14 Political structures refer specifically to the
institutional and administrative organization of the state; collective agency
refers to the mobilization of ordinary people in the policy‐making process. These
features shape how people take action in politics and how people understand the
nature and meaning of their actions. Taken together, these two dimensions form
modes of governance. They create an underlying texture of political life in a
particular place. They form the organizing principles, classification schemes, the
taken‐for‐granted assumptions, the routines and habits of political interaction,
or, in Pierre Bourdieu's terms, a habitus of political action. They significantly
shape the way people make sense of political conflict and the ways they try to
resolve it. This means that we are likely to see variation rather than uniformity
in the ways people understand the very nature of political problems and how
they try to solve, avoid, escalate, or defuse them.15
The subtle but crucial differences in the political institutions and democratic
traditions of the American states help account for penal regime variation. When
Page 6 of 25
we see significant changes in the political order, we are likely to see

transformation in penal regimes; likewise, when we see variation or differences
between political orders, we are likely to see correlative differences in penal
regimes.
(p.10) The second major claim of this book is that penal regime change,
continuity, and difference are significantly shaped by place. Penal regime
variation is shaped by local and state‐level institutional configurations as well as
national and global trends. Crime and punishment tend to be experienced and
made meaningful on a more local level even as these institutions are subject to
and agents of broad social and cultural changes. People tend to experience and
understand the common conditions of contemporary life in ways that are
reflective of their immediate context, their past traditions, and in ways that help
them make sense of the changing world around them.16 Moreover, people tend
to take action with the tools, schemas, and resources available to them in their
particular contexts. As a consequence, we tend to see variation rather than
uniformity in state‐level responses to crime and other perceived problems of
social order.
Comparative and historical methodology is used to develop these arguments, the

first study of American punishment to do so.17 This study not only takes into
account the broad social conditions that underlie the development of particular
penal regimes, it takes seriously the longlasting and cumulative effects of the
cultural and political differences that give expression to the unique punishment
practices in each state. For each case study, I analyze and compare a wide
variety of data sources, including archival material, citizens' letters to political
leaders, internal government reports and memos, written and oral public
testimony, newspaper accounts, extensive secondary literature, and survey and
statistical data. By taking advantage of underutilized data sources and the
analytical leverage provided by a small number of cases, this study closely
examines the dynamic interface between the state and civil society in the
policymaking process.
Case Studies
In the California case, political actors operate within a neopopulist mode of
governance with a high degree of democratization but intensive social
polarization. Here, key actors such as the governor, state officials, and social
activists are more likely to view crime as a result of moral depravity, individual
failing, and social indecency. With their depressed sense of mutual obligation
and heightened contentiousness and uncompromising, winner‐take‐all politics,
citizens tend to support and often demand that state elites pursue a more
retributive penal regime. California's retributive penal regime (p.11) not only
mandates penal sanctioning across crime categories, it changed the moral
calculus of justice in the state, dramatizing the pain and suffering of crime
victims as the justification for increased sanctions. It intensifies the repressive
Page 7 of 25
powers of the state to resolve social conflict, creating more exclusionary

conditions of citizenship.
By contrast, in the Washington case, political actors operate within a more

deliberative democracy, a mode of governance that emphasizes citizen
participation, discussion, compromise, and self‐governance. Here key actors
such as state officials and public participants are more likely to view crime as a
result of failed socialization and a common but unfortunate condition of affluent
societies. With their well‐developed norms of reciprocity and sense of mutual
obligation, they tend to be reluctant to impose the repressive powers of the state
on others, seeking at various times to de‐escalate imprisonment. At the same
time, the legacy of cooperatives and self‐governance provide the cultural and
institutional support necessary for officials to pursue noncustodial community
sanctions based primarily on the discipline of labor and the perceived virtues but
coercive powers of civil society. Taken together, these policies and practices
restrain state coercion, creating more inclusionary but normalizing conditions of
citizenship.
In the case of New York, political actors operate within a mode of elitist
pragmatism. With its depressed democratization and heavy reliance on
expertise, state officials are more likely to portray crime as a threat to public
health, a contagion to be quarantined, defusing the emotional and moral
dimensions of both crime and punishment. They develop a managerial penal
regime, a triage approach to penal sanctioning that sorts and classifies
perceived risks and allocates resources accordingly. This apparently reasonable
and pragmatic approach to crime with its strategic use of state power
nevertheless tends to suppress individual autonomy and liberty in favor of the
perceived public good, creating restrictive conditions of citizenship.
Key Findings: Deep Democracy, Less Coercion; ThinDemocracy, More

Coercion
By focusing on the complex political processes at the subnational level, this book
challenges a taken‐for‐granted assumption about the democratic process and
punishment. As this study shows, the apparent link between public participation,
punitiveness, and rough justice is not only historically (p.12) contingent but
dependent on specific state structures and patterns of civic engagement,
patterns that tend to vary within the United States and across liberal
democracies. Public vengeance depends on certain political institutions and
collective agency to give it a legal and political expression.
Perhaps more important, the research suggests a counterintuitive claim:

increased democratization can support and sustain less coercive penal regimes.
This study offers an analysis of an understudied and countervailing practice of
de‐escalation, a practice that should certainly be of interest to those challenging
the massive prison build‐up over the past thirty years. At the same time, the
Page 8 of 25
analysis suggests that at the aggregate level, depressed civic engagement,

withdrawal from public life, and lack of public participation in the political
process may underpin mass incarceration in the United States. Consider that
fewer people vote in national and state elections, fewer people get involved in
civic affairs and local politics, congressional and state‐level elections are less
competitive, and elite‐driven professional organizations have replaced many of
the locally run grassroots organizations that once buoyed American democracy
for most for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.18 These trends have
coincided and share affinities with the increased reliance on imprisonment and
other coercive forms of state power, especially as it has been used against those
who are the least politically and socially integrated, the poor, undereducated,
and racial and ethnic minorities. We may be witnessing the retrenchment of
American democracy and its repressive aftermath.
An understanding of penal sanctioning and the processes that bring them about
are essential for understanding the nature and character of democracy and
citizenship. Ever since the Enlightenment, the prison has been a major site of
democratic state building as it created new institutions of crime control and new
sites of state power from policing to sentencing.19 The prison also helped
establish new frameworks for understanding and classifying citizenship in
democratic societies as it distinguished which people are subject to state
sanction, which are not, and why. By setting the limits of what state authorities
could do to someone who broke the law, penal sanctioning helped define
individual rights and protections from state power. Moreover, by giving legal and
political expression to polity members' feelings of scorn, resentment, pity, mercy,
sympathy, and indifference, penal sanctioning also helps clarify which people are
subject to social exclusion and which are candidates for reintegration.20 As a
mechanism of political integration, it identifies which people are valued and
welcomed as full (p.13) citizens and which are not. By doing so, punishment
sorts and stratifies equality.
By taking up these themes, this book aims to contribute to a sociological

understanding of the relationship between punishment and democracy,
especially as punishment has helped define, classify, and sometimes change the
nature of political authority and the conditions of citizenship and equality in
democratic societies. If we think of the democratic process as how people self‐
govern and how they mobilize collectively to do so, it indicates how certain
social groups dominate others, integrating and excluding individuals through
particular policies and programs. The prison provides a vivid illustration of this
collective process of categorization and social ordering, especially its
exclusionary dimension.
Page 9 of 25
Qualifying Penal Regimes

This study seeks to identify the most significant penal regime in each state.
Because penal sanctioning tends to be multidimensional, overlapping, and
sometimes inconsistent, I focus on the dominant penal regime rather than the
entirety of criminal justice policies in each state. I identify and examine the
discourse on crime, conceptualizations of justice, the rationale for punishment,
the set, range, and intensity of penal sanctions, and imprisonment rates in each
case.
It is important to clarify that a state's penal regime, including its imprisonment

rate, is the result of continuous rather than discrete actions. A state's prison
population, for example, cannot be created overnight by a dramatic piece of
legislation nor by public outrage; nor can it be controlled by the actions of one
person or interest group. Criminal justice policy spans multiple jurisdictions and
multiple levels of government. It is organized around system‐wide discretion in
which the actions of a local beat cop can sometimes determine who ends up in
prison. This means that a penal regime and its associated imprisonment rate are
the result of cumulative actions, some of which are immediate, such as arrest
rates, charging decisions, sentencing policies, and release decisions, while
others are much slower and long‐term, like changes in cultural values or
political institutions that occur over time. In this kind of causal process, crime
control policies can result in outcomes at times other than their proximity to the
events under investigation.21
(p.14) Just as natural scientists study the long‐term and sometimes delayed
effects of colder and deeper ocean currents on much warmer southern seas
great distances away, we can think of causality in crime control in much the
same way. By doing so, we can see that the war on drugs and certain three
strikes legislation, for example, will probably continue to impact imprisonment
populations for some time to come but are not sufficient explanations of
contemporary penal regimes. By taking into account cumulative processes over
time, we also gain an appreciation for the significant effects of past practices. In
the early 1970s, as state officials adapted to a new set of governing conditions
(namely, increasing crime), they experimented with new policy initiatives. But
they could not simply break away from nor override the path dependencies
established by previous penal policies.22 The resulting penal regimes have the
distinction of being both old and new simultaneously. To understand the present,
we need to examine the past,23 especially the complex processes of change and
continuity.
Moreover, the book focuses on the use of imprisonment rather than policing,
probation, jail, or parole. This restriction keeps the study manageable. I make no
claims about mapping the entirety of crime control policies and practices in
these states. During this thirty‐year period, each state passed a broad range of
criminal justice policy initiatives concerning but not limited to sentencing
Page 10 of 25
reform, parole reform, drug offenders, repeat offenders, sex offenders,

community policing, juvenile justice, prison labor, crime victims compensation,
victim impact statements, and new approaches to crime prevention—each of
which was the result of a specific set of institutional and political configurations
that are well beyond the scope of this study.
More important, I focus on imprisonment because the prison, although an early

nineteenth‐century invention, still occupies a privileged position in the
repertoire of criminal justice because all states rely on imprisonment in
response to crime—they just do so differently. More important, imprisonment is
one of the most intrusive and tactile displays of state power. Through penal
sanctioning the state reasserts its right to rule a territory and its people and do
so with force if necessary. This kind of power is simply awesome in its sheer
control over the life of another human being. Imprisonment makes visible the
state's power to punish as the offender is literally encased inside the state.
Imprisonment, like state execution (a relatively rare occurrence despite its hold
on the public imagination)24 and conscription into the military, is a raw and (p.
15) physical form of power that can subdue the minds and bodies within its
grasp, especially as it infringes on a person's sense of autonomy and selfhood.25
Imprisonment captures something meaningful about the relationship between

rulers and ruled in democratic societies. A liberal democracy like the United
States is defined by the extent to which individual rights and autonomy are
valued and protected from abuses of governmental power and from the
intolerance of the majority. Imprisonment represents the extent to which
democracies are willing to infringe on those rights and obligations, especially as
they are determined by collective action. This book explores the conditions
under which state officials and social groups in civil society are willing to impose
on the sanctity of individual autonomy and why some U.S. states are more
willing than others to engage in this practice.
Case Selection
So which states are more willing than others to infringe on the rights and
liberties of convicted criminal offenders? Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi
imprison more people per capita than any other state, each with an
imprisonment rate (excluding jail) of well over 600 inmates per 100,000
population.26 Maine, Minnesota, and Rhode Island currently imprison the fewest
people per capita, each with an imprisonment rate of under 200 inmates per
100,000 population.27 Yet this book is about Washington, New York, and
California, none of which fall in the top five or bottom five rates of
imprisonment, none of which are the extreme cases. Instead, these states
represent the general and differentiated patterns of punishment we see across
the fifty states. They represent what this study refers to as de‐escalation,
managerialism, and retribution, respectively. At the beginning of the study, each
state fell into the top, middle, and bottom third of state‐level imprisonment
Page 11 of 25
rates. Currently, Washington imprisons 273 inmates per 100,000, ranking forty‐
first in the nation; New York 322, ranking thirty‐seventh in the nation (it ranked
thirtieth at the beginning of this study); and California 471, ranking fifteenth in
the nation.28 By looking at these particular states rather than others, this move
allows me to examine trends that may be more common across a wide range of
states while maintaining a tight analytical focus on a small number of cases. This
strategy maximizes the potential explanatory power of the case studies.
(p.16) Crime Rates

Some readers may be quick to point out that states with higher crime rates have
higher imprisonment rates. For example, South Carolina has one of the highest
violent crime rates in the United States, as well as one of the highest
imprisonment rates.29 Similarly, Maine has very low crime rates and very low
imprisonment rates. This is an intuitive observation because every sentence of
imprisonment is imposed in the wake of a criminal conviction. It is also an
observation that is taken seriously by this study. However, what is less clear is
why some states with similarly high crime rates may be less likely to rely on
imprisonment or why states with low crime rates may rely heavily on
imprisonment. Tennessee, for example, ranks second in violent crime but twenty‐
second in imprisonment rates; likewise, Alaska ranks sixth in violent crime but
twenty‐fifth in imprisonment rates.30 Washington, California, and New York have
all maintained relatively high crime rates for nearly thirty years but pursued
different kinds of penal regimes. Violent crime in Washington is lower than in
California and New York, but the overall crime rate in Washington has hovered
well above the national average for over thirty years, at times higher than that in
California or New York.31
It also less clear why the doubling of crime rates between 1965 and 1975 in
nearly every state did not lead to the doubling of imprisonment rates in nearly
every state. Many commentators view the increase in crime as simply a
technological advance in which law enforcement improved its ability to record
crime and a cultural change in which the public became more willing to report it
—both imply an artificial rise in crime in a relatively short period of time.32
Despite these doubts, however, many state officials, legislators, grassroots
activists, and criminal justice officials experienced rising crime in the late 1960s
as a real event with material consequences for the criminal justice system, an
experience supported by increasing homicide rates.33 The experience of high
crime put tremendous pressure on understaffed, decentralized, and
undermodernized criminal justice systems. So much so that many state and
criminal justice officials began to rethink their approach to crime control, which
by the 1970s seemed ineffective and perhaps even counterproductive. This book
is about how and why certain state officials, legislators, grassroots activists, and
criminal justice officials came to perceive and characterize the experience of
Page 12 of 25
rising crime as a policy problem in the (p.17) first place, and how they did so in
different ways in different political contexts.
There is no unmediated or pure experience of crime because it is a product of

social interaction and requires interpretation. The interpretation of crime is in
turn shaped by culturally available schemas or frameworks of understanding in
particular places and times, schemas that are themselves shaped by varying
forms of social organization.34 For example, seventeenth‐century Puritans
perceived crime as sin, an unholy act against God that necessitated retribution
and even purification. Likewise, the late nineteenth‐century Women's Christian
Temperance Union and the Anti‐Saloon League associated drinking with sin,
disease, disorder, and inevitable social disintegration, an interpretive act that
led to social hygiene campaigns and increased state regulation of private life and
community health. More recently in the 1960s, critical criminologists viewed
crime as the result of class conflict and social deprivation, an inevitable act in an
unequal society based on the exploitation of the poor and socially marginalized.
The shock of high crime in 1960s took on a different meaning and character in
Washington, California, and New York as key actors interpreted this steep
increase in different ways. In Washington, state officials, criminal justice actors,
politicians, and engaged citizens tended to characterize crime as the
consequences of social deprivation and as a common condition in affluent
societies. In response, government officials asked citizens to alter their behavior
to decrease the opportunities for crime and they promoted various work
programs to make up for offenders' failed socialization. In New York, state
officials interpreted crime in epidemiological terms, making an analogy between
rising crime and the spread of infectious, contagious diseases, and they tended
to favor policy responses based on the quarantine of perceived risks, particularly
drugs and violent crime. In California, crime became associated with moral
depravity and weakened social controls. Crime was characterized as an insult to
the people who helped build and benefited from the Golden State's generous
social policies and myths of limitless opportunity, both of which were
undermined by the experience of high crime. As a consequence, crime policy in
California became rather punitive, designed to punish offenders for this
transgression and express resentment. How and why these states developed
their particular punishment regimes is rooted to a certain degree in the
historically contingent conceptualizations of the crime problem and is evidenced
by the discourse on crime control.
(p.18) Race
Some readers may point to racial differences in the cases as a plausible
explanation for variation in penal regimes because researchers have established
an important relationship between the size of a state's black population and
imprisonment rates. According to this argument, a relatively large black
population poses an economic and political threat to the white majority,
Page 13 of 25
subsequently leading whites to support and demand more punitive penal

sanctioning.35 To be sure, African Americans and other minorities are
overrepresented in U.S. prisons, and contentious racial politics clearly play a
role. What we still need to theorize and explain is why and how different states
developed different kinds of penal regimes. Recall that they all did not respond
punitively to the changing social order or the success of the civil rights
movement. New York's black population, for example, has been nearly twice that
of California's since the 1960s,36 yet state officials developed a managerial penal
regime with lower imprisonment rates. Likewise, Washington's relatively small
black population does not explain the character and meaning of the state's penal
regime or why officials pursued de‐escalation in the face of high crime and a
rapidly increasing black population in the 1960s. An absence does not explain a
presence. Racial politics rather than racial demographics shape imprisonment
patterns and are likely to vary by political context.
Specifically, the political incorporation of African Americans may have played an

important role in moderating punitiveness. In states where black Americans and
their advocates increased black integration into the political process and
codified antidiscrimination laws throughout the 1950s and 1960s, we might
expect to see less reliance on coercive social controls. By contrast, in states that
continued to exclude African Americans from full citizenship, restricting their
political participation and weakening their economic viability, we might expect
to see higher reliance on repression, including imprisonment. Black
incorporation not only indicates a more inclusive notion of citizenship but also
gives political actors opportunities to develop social trust and norms of
reciprocity across social groups, an imperative in complex political communities
that depend on compromise. Political incorporation may provide a buffer against
the use of imprisonment as a blunt instrument of racial social control.
Already by the mid‐1950s, both New York and Washington State passed fair
employment antidiscrimination laws and created enforcement agencies; by the
mid‐1960s, both had passed fair housing and open accommodations
antidiscrimination laws along with enforcement agencies.37 New (p.19) York
created the New York State Civil Rights Bureau along with strengthening
antidiscrimination laws in employment, housing, and public accommodation and
promoted equal opportunity.38 Although California passed antidiscrimination
laws in the 1950s, racial politics since the mid‐1960s have been and continue to
be much more polarized and exclusionary than in New York or Washington.39 In
the mid‐1960s, California voters rejected pro‐civil rights legislation, rejecting
the Rumford Fair Housing Act, a far‐reaching statute that would have protected
blacks from widespread housing discrimination,40 a move that most likely
prompted the Watts Riots of 1965 and subsequent backlash.
Page 14 of 25
Democratic Process
What makes California, Washington, and New York so interesting, especially for
this study, is precisely the nature and character of their democratic processes.
For example, the political structures and collective agency in California and
Washington, like much of the west, are rooted in populism—more direct forms of
citizen participation in governmental decision making. By the turn of the
twentieth century, the populist movement and the progressive movement that
followed led to the fundamental restructuring of government and expanded
democratization.41 With the introduction of voter initiatives, ordinary people
could draft their own legislation, essentially bypassing elected officials and state
legislatures, deemed at the time to be corrupt and unresponsive to the public's
demands. More people had access to and were integrated in the political
process. Today, California and Washington have some of the most open political
institutions in the United States; both have had, for part of the twentieth
century, some of the most generous social policies in the nation.
These two states are puzzling cases because they eventually diverged from this
shared past and adopted distinctive forms of governance. By the mid‐1960s, we
can see the emergence of a more reactionary and antistatist form of populism in
California, based on the deep distrust of both government and expert
knowledge. Somewhat paradoxically, this form weakened citizen participation in
political life and increased the protection of private self‐interest over the pursuit
of public goods. By contrast, in Washington, by the mid‐ to late 1960s, we can
see the emergence of institutions and collective agency oriented toward open
and public debates, and discussion—a set of institutions that values compromise,
mutual cooperation, and self‐governance. This more deliberative style of
governance shares certain affinities with a more inclusive stance toward the
provision of public goods and members' well‐being.
(p.20) New York provides a counterbalance to these states. It shares none of

California and Washington's familiarity with populism and direct democracy. The
populist movement and the various farmers' alliances failed miserably in New
York. Instead political authority is highly centralized and insulated from public
participation. Ordinary people have very little direct access to governmental
decision making, the initiative process does not exist, and few people turn out to
vote.42 The executive branch, headed by the governor, is one of the most
powerful in the United States in terms of its capacity to control the budget, veto
legislation, make appointments to state agencies, and repeatedly run for
reelection.43
Given these indicators of a somewhat limited public participation, it is surprising

that New York has maintained some of the most generous social policies in the
country. This practice, important for punishment policy, is itself rooted in the
fertile period of political transformation that swept most of the country during
the early part of the twentieth century. The progressive movement, dominated
Page 15 of 25
by middle‐class professionals and other elites, made a serious challenge to New

York's patronage and machine‐based politics. The progressives ushered in a new
form of pragmatic governance—a form that relied extensively on expert
knowledge, professionals, technocrats, bureaucrats, and other state insiders to
pursue public works in the most rational and efficient way possible. By the
1960s, we can see an almost idealized form of pragmatism in New York
operating under the strong leadership of Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
New York is a complex case because political authority is highly centralized and
collective agency tends to be pragmatic, reliant on expertise, and oriented
toward problem solving, but it also shows tendencies toward elitism and the
pursuit of private self‐interest. From the time of Dutch settlements onward, state
officials have consolidated power, concentrating it in the executive branch, and
to a certain extent have restricted democratization. So what we see in New York
is the continuity of elitism—the elite dominance of political power—but
discontinuity in collective action. Collective agency shifts from patronage politics
and the pursuit of private gain and self‐interest to the ideals of progressive
pragmatism and the pursuit of public works, without making a clean break from
either one.
In the pages that follow, I develop an account of punishment that relates it to the
character of the democratic process. Chapter 2 establishes the theoretical basis
for this study. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deploy the theoretical framework to sort out
and make sense of the empirical variation in imprisonment in (p.21) California,
Washington, and New York. The case studies show how differences in political
structure and collective agency lead to differentiated penal sanctioning in the
states. The case studies also locate these patterns in the broader social and
historical context of the late 1960s and 1970s. The last chapter brings together
the findings of the case studies to explain why and how the democratic process
matters to any explanation of punishment. I highlight convergences and
divergences in penal policy by trying to make some sense of the complicated
nature of change and continuity in both American democracy and American
punishment. The last chapter raises several important implications for
understanding punishment in America as well as other advanced liberal
democracies.
What about the South? Readers may wonder why the case studies do not focus
on any of the southern states since the South tends to have the highest
imprisonment rates. The South was excluded because this region has been and
continues to be relatively underdemocratized compared to every other region in
the United States. With its historical ties to feudal‐like social and political
hierarchies, slavery, weakened central government, and underdemocratized
polity, the South has followed a different path of penal development than most
other American states. That path includes the brutal use of convict leasing and
state‐sanctioned lynching, both of which involved a disproportionate number of
Page 16 of 25
African American men and high rates of mortality. These practices existed into
the twentieth century, when most other states debated and many adopted the
principles and practices of the rehabilitative ideal. With some exceptions, much
of southern punishment has tended to favor relatively harsh penal sanctions for
most of the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries, imprisoning as well as
executing the most people per capita in the nation. In a book that covers three
other American states in some detail, I felt I could not do justice to the depth
and complexities of southern punishment, especially since it has followed a
different historical path. Southern punishment requires its own intensive study,
a project I leave, for the moment, to others.
Rationale and Implications of this Study

One of the central aims of this project is to understand and try to provide some
insight into the democratic process—its varying political structures and diverse
forms of collective action—and its relationship to punishment. With a few
important exceptions, it is a process that has been somewhat neglected and (p.
22) understudied by current scholarship in both political sociology and
criminology.44 In the academic division of labor, students of politics, power, and
social movements for the most part have left questions of criminal justice,
criminal law, and penal sanctioning to others, implicitly accepting official
narratives about crime and punishment as beyond the realm of political
contestation and social conflict. Nor has this field of study incorporated in any
serious way the structuring role of punishment in the production of political
authority, citizenship, and state legitimacy. Likewise, criminologists, concerned
more about the causes of crime, for the most part have not taken up questions
about the nature and character of democracy, governance, and state power in
any way that goes beyond the instrumentalist neo‐Marxian perspective that
views the forms of punishment as mere reflections of existing economic relations
and a function of social control—here the “state” is epiphenomenal, redundant,
and beholden to economic imperatives.
This book seeks to address these oversights by building on recent work in the
sociology of punishment, work that takes seriously the changing nature of
governance in contemporary societies. My argument is consistent to a certain
degree with current scholarship that has identified the changing nature of
governance as bringing about increased harshness in American punishment.45
As Jonathan Simon, David Garland, and Loïc Wacquant (among others) have
pointed out, the nature of governance has taken on a more neoliberal character
—that is to say, as it has prioritized privatization and market solutions to
complex social problems and downplayed more inclusive welfarist policies
intended to alleviate some of the ill effects of capitalist economies.46 Subsequent
to these shifts in governance, we have seen the intensification of state
repression in response to crime and other perceived problems of order.
Page 17 of 25
Although this book builds on common ground with many leading accounts, it
takes important departures from current scholarship. It focuses on the chronic
and long‐term differences across the states, rather than the secular upward
trend in imprisonment rates, paying more attention to differentiated experiences
of crime and differentiated responses. As a consequence, this analysis points to
variation rather than uniformity in the way that ordinary people and state
officials try to resolve conflicts over social ordering, political community, and
citizenship through penal sanctioning. By examining a differentiated democratic
process, this analysis suggests that increased democratization can support de‐
escalation in imprisonment while retrenchment in democracy can lead to
increased state coercion.
(p.23) Moreover, an understanding of the democratic process and its

relationship to penal sanctioning is crucial to understanding the changing nature
of governance in the twenty‐first century. It can help us understand how we are
changing the way we live our daily lives. As many commentators have noted, the
basic forms of government and social organization are slowly being reconfigured
in real time. In response to the forces of globalization and its associated
pressures of economic and political integration, the modern nation‐state faces
serious challenges to its sovereignty and legitimacy. With the expansion of
supranational entities, such as the European Union, the World Trade
Organization, and International Criminal Court, the modern nation‐state no
longer maintains exclusive control over law, regulation, and rule making.47 As
political theorist Jean Cohen explains, political sovereignty is becoming
“disaggregated” and shared across jurisdictions as the nation‐state no longer
fully controls “its own territory, borders, resident population, as well as the
internal hazards that threaten its citizens.”48
In response to some of these pressures, many Western democracies have

changed their basic approach to governing. Confronted by a globalizing
economy, many have reorganized their once generous social welfare policies and
programs, which are aimed not only at the poor but the middle classes, to keep
up with international competition. Alongside these changes, we have also
witnessed changes in the social relations that make up civil society as social
trust and mutual identification have been slowly replaced by suspicion and
resentment, animosity aimed especially at those social groups that are
marginally integrated into political and economic life. At the same time, many
American states and some European nations have become more willing to use
imprisonment and other coercive forms of state power in response to crime and
other complex social problems.
As these social transformations continue, the question remains which states will
be more likely to pursue this particular policy response. An understanding of the
diversity of states and democratic institutions and practices not only in America
but in the post–cold war Europe may help us sort out which nation‐states are
Page 18 of 25
more likely to rely on more coercive approaches to governance. An appreciation

of the differences across democratic societies can helps us tease out which
mechanisms, cultural resources, institutions, and practices—centralization,
bureaucratization, deliberation, participation—depress or exacerbate state
repression. By paying attention to the divergences in democracy as well as long‐
standing path dependencies, we may be able to explain why some states more
than others are willing to use imprisonment and (p.24) other policing
mechanisms to redefine the conditions of citizenship and quite possibly
undermine notions of political and social equality. We may be able to explain why
some states more than others rely on the structural role of punishment to
redefine political sovereignty and shore up legitimacy in the face of
transnational realignment and globalization. This book aims to contribute to this
conversation.
Notes:
(1.) Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prisoners in 2007,” available at http://
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p07.pdf (March 12, 2009); Bureau of Justice
Statistics, “Jail Statistics,” available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/jails.htm
(June 23, 2008); Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice
Statistics—1976 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977); The
Sentencing Project, “Incarceration,” available at http://
www.sentencingproject.org/IssueAreaHome.aspx?IssueID=2 (June 23, 2008).
(2.) Marc Mauer, “Comparative International Rates of Incarceration: An

Examination of Causes and Trends” (Sentencing Project, 2003), 2.
(3.) On the devastating effects of mass imprisonment on economic and social life,
see Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality (New York: Russell Sage, 2006);
on the difficulties of prisoner reentry into mainstream society, see Joan
Petersilia, When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003); on the negative effects of mass imprisonment on
particular social groups and neighborhoods, see Todd Clear, Imprisoning
Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods
Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
(4.) Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prisoners in 2007,” 8.
(5.) For a vivid look at Angola prison, see the documentary film by Jonathan
Stack and Liz Garbus, The Farm: Life inside Angola Prison (New York: A&E
Home Video, 1998).
(6.) On the emotional toll capital punishment has on corrections staff, see Bob
Herbert, “In America; Inside the Death House,” New York Times, October 9,
2000.
Page 19 of 25
(7.) Oregon Department of Corrections, “What Is Community Corrections,”

available at http://www.oregon.gov/DOC/TRANS/CC/whatiscc.shtml (June 12,
2008).
(8.) Judith A. Greene, Smart on Crime: Positive Trends in State‐Level Sentencing

and Corrections Policy (Washington, D.C.: Families against Mandatory
Minimums, 2003), 12.
(9.) Greene, Smart on Crime.
(10.) Greene, Smart on Crime.
(11.) For important exceptions, see recent work on subnational imprisonment

variation: David F. Greenberg and Valerie West, “State Prison Populations and
Their Growth, 1971–1991,” Criminology 39.3 (August 2001): 615–653; Katherine
Beckett and Bruce Western, “Governing Social Marginality: Welfare,
Incarceration, and the Transformation of State Policy,” Punishment & Society 3.1
(January 2001): 43–59; on spending, see David Jacobs and Ronald Helms,
“Collective Outbursts, Politics, and Punitive Outbursts: Toward a Political
Sociology of Spending on Social Control,” Social Forces 77.4 (June 1999): 1497–
1523.
(12.) See David Garland, “Limits of the Sovereign State,” British Journal of
Criminology 36.4 (1996): 445–471.
(13.) In 2007, the most current Bureau of Justice Statistics figures available,
California imprisoned 471 inmates per 100,000 population, Washington
imprisoned 273 inmates per 100,000 population, New York imprisoned 322
inmates per 100,000 population, and the U.S. states overall averaged 447
inmates per 100,000 population. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prisoners in
2007,” 18.
(14.) Political institutional theory has been particularly influential. See Theda
Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy
in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Edwin
Amenta, Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American
Social Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); for review see
Edwin Amenta, “State‐Centered and Political Institutional Theory: Retrospect
and Prospect,” in Handbook of Political Sociology: States, Civil Societies and
Globalization, eds. Thomas Janoski, Robert Alford, Alexander Hicks, and Mildred
Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 96–114. On the
character of democratic politics, see Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy:
Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984); Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern
Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Page 20 of 25
(15.) Political scientists have studied how American federalism allows for
political variation on the state level, which subsequently influences subnational
policy development. See, for example, Daniel Elazar, American Federalism: A
View from the States (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966); Virginia Gray and
Russell L. Hanson, eds., Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis
(Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2004); Thomas Dye, Politics in
States and American Communities (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988).
This study takes cues from this work but is ultimately tied to sociological
theories of action.
(16.) On the localized experience of crime and globalization, see Evi Girling, Ian
Loader, and Richard Sparks, Crime and Social Change in Middle England:
Questions of Order in an English Town (London: Routledge, 2000). On the
importance of local politics of crime control, see the classic Stuart Scheingold,
The Politics of Street Crime: Criminal Process and Cultural Obsession
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Lisa L. Miller, The Perils of
Federalism: Race, Poverty and the Politics of Crime Control (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
(17.) David Downes, Contrasts in Tolerance: Post‐War Penal Policy in the

Netherlands and England and Wales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
(18.) U.S. Census Bureau, “Participation in Elections for President and US

Representatives: 1932–2006, Table 406,” available at http://www.census.gov/
compendia/statab/tables/08s0406.pdf (January 30, 2008); Theda Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic
Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Robert Putnam, Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2000).
(19.) Michel Foucault vividly describes this process in Discipline and Punish as
he traces the transformation of political power through changing penal
practices. He explains how the prison represented a different kind of political
power than the terrorizing and brutal power displayed by the public executions
so central to monarchical rule. The prison, through its strict routine, intensive
surveillance, and insidious use of social scientific knowledge, exercised a form of
power designed to control and transform criminal offenders rather than maim or
kill them. By doing so, it helped create a specific kind of modern political
subject, disciplined, self‐censoring, industrious, and conditioned for self‐rule. For
Foucault, this development was no less repressive than monarchical rule
because it simply replaced one strategy of power for another, replacing blood
and death with conformity and normalization. But it was also productive in the
sense that the prison helped establish a particular type of political subjectivity
resonant with the new political order based on freedom. Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977);
Page 21 of 25
Thomas Dumm, Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United

States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Marie Gottschalk, The
Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jonathan Simon, Governing
through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and
Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
(20.) On the role of emotions, political community, and state sanctions, see Ian
Loader and Neil Walker, Civilizing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007); Ian Loader, “Policing, Recognition and Belonging,” Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 605.1 (May 2006): 202–221;
and Ian Loader, “Playing with Fire?: Democracy and the Emotions of Crime and
Punishment,” in Emotions, Crime and Justice, eds. S. Karstedt, Ian Loader, and
Heather Strang (Oxford, UK: Hart, forthcoming).
(21.) On cumulative causality, see Paul Pierson, “Big, Slow‐Moving, and Invisible:
Macrosocial Processes in the Study of Comparative Politics,” in Comparative
Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, eds. James Mahoney and Dietrich
Rueschemeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 177–207.
(22.) On path dependencies, see Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State?
Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1994). On the problem of change and continuity in political
institutionalism, see Elisabeth Clemens and James Cook, “Politics and
Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change,” Annual Review of Sociology
25 (1999): 441–466.
(23.) For a helpful discussion on a genealogical approach to historical material,

see David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in
Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 2.
(24.) According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), forty‐two people were
executed in 2006. This figure contrasts sharply with the 2.2 million people
imprisoned in state or federal prisons or local jails. See BJS, “Capital
Punishment Statistics: Summary Findings,” available at http://
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cp.htm (January 21, 2008); BJS, “Prison Statistics:
Summary Findings,” available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm
(January 21, 2008).
(25.) On the dehumanizing aspects of confinement, particularly the nearly total

loss of individual autonomy, see Gresham Sykes, Society of Captives: A Study of
Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958). On
the psychological and debilitating effects of long‐term isolation, see Craig Haney,
“Psychological Impact of Incarceration: Implications for Postprison Adjustment,”
in Prisoners Once Removed: The Impact of Incarceration and Reentry on
Page 22 of 25
Children, Families, and Communities, eds. Jeremy Travis and Michelle Waul
(Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2003), 33–66.
(26.) BJS, “Prisoners in 2007,” available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/

p05.pdf (January 30, 2008), 18.
(27.) BJS, “Prisoners in 2007,” 18.
(31.) The total crime rate in Washington has fluctuated between 6,100–6,500
since the mid‐1970s, compared to 5,200 of the national average, New York's
4,500–5,600 and California's 7,200–5,800. Although Washington's violent crime
rate has been relatively low, under 500, and under the national average since the
1960s, the violent crime rate there as well as in New York and California
increased substantially between 1965 and 1975, a critical period under
investigation. See Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Uniform Crime Report
1965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office); FBI, “Uniform Crime
Report 2006,” available at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2006/index.html (February 1,
2008); BJS, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics—1976; BJS, Sourcebook of
Criminal Justice Statistics—1986 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1987).
(32.) See discussion in Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in
Contemporary American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
(33.) Consider, for example, that the rate for murder and non‐negligent
manslaughter increased from 5.1 in 1965 to 9.6 by 1975. See “Estimated
number and rate (per 100,000 inhabitants) of offenses known to the police. By
offense, United States, 1960–2006, Table 3.106.2006,” available at http://
www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t31062006.pdf (January 30, 2008).
(34.) See Scheingold, Politics of Street Crime; Theodore Sasson, Crime Talk:
How Citizens Construct a Social Problem (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995).
(35.) See review on racial threat hypothesis, in Greenberg and West, “State
Prison Populations.”
(36.) In 1960, New York's black population was 8.4 percent compared to 5.6
percent in California or 1.7 percent in Washington State. By 1975, New York's
black population reached nearly 12 percent, compared to 7 percent in California
and 2 percent in Washington. In 2006, New York's black population measured
over 17 percent, compared to less than 7 percent in California or about 3.5
Page 23 of 25
percent in Washington. See U.S. Census Bureau, “The 1966 Statistical Abstract,”
available at http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1966-01.pdf
(February 1, 2008); U.S. Census Bureau, “The 1978 Statistical Abstract,”
available at http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1978-01.pdf
(February 1, 2008); U.S. Census Bureau, “The 2007 Statistical Abstract,”
available at http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/index.html (February 1,
2008).
(37.) Duane Lockard, Toward Equal Opportunity: A Study of State and Local
Antidiscrimination Laws (New York: Macmillan, 1968).
(38.) Lockard, Toward Equal Opportunity; John H. Mollenkopf, “New York: The
Great Anomaly,” in Racial Politics in the American Cities, eds. Rufus P. Browning,
Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Taub (New York: Longman Press, 1990).
(39.) Jeffrey S. Adler, “Introduction,” in African American Mayors: Race, Politics

and the American City, eds. David R. Colburn and Jeffrey S. Adler (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2001).
(40.) Raymond Wolfinger and Fred Greenstein, “Repeal of Fair Housing in

California: An Analysis of Referendum Voting,” American Political Science
Review 62.3 (September 1968): 753–769.
(41.) On the populist movement, see Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment:
A Short History of Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978); on populism and the progressive movement in California and Washington,
see Elisabeth Clemens, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the
Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
(42.) New York has relatively low voter participation. In 2006, for example, 37.6
percent of the voting age population voted, compared to 43.6 percent of the
national average. See U.S. Census Bureau, “Persons Reported Registered and
Voted by State: 2006, Table 405,” available at http://www.census.gov/compendia/
statab/tables/08s0405.pdf (January 30, 2008).
(43.) Thad Beyle has compiled a very useful index of governors' institutional
powers. He measures the degree to which governors control budgets,
legislation, appointments, political parties; the strength of veto power; and the
length of tenure, including the presence or absence of term limits. New York
scores well above the national average on Beyle's index. See Thad Beyle, “The
Governors,” in Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis, 8th ed.,
eds. Virginia Gray and Russell Hanson (Washington, D.C.: Congressional
Quarterly Press, 2004), 212–213.
Page 24 of 25
(44.) For important exceptions and insightful analyses of political processes and
punishment, see Gottschalk,The Prison and the Gallows; Joachim J. Savelsberg,
“Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment,” American Journal of
Sociology 99.4 (Jan. 1994): 911–943; James J. Willis, “Transportation versus
Imprisonment in Eighteenth‐ and Nineteenth‐Century Britain: Penal Power,
Liberty, and the State,” Law & Society Review 39.1 (2005): 171–210; James Q.
Whitman, Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between
America and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Miller, The Perils
of Federalism.
(45.) On the “harshness” of American punishment and a useful

conceptualization, see Whitman, Harsh Justice, chapter 2.
(46.) Garland, Culture of Control; Simon, Governing through Crime; Beckett,

Making Crime Pay; Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison
Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3.1 (2001): 95–134.
(47.) Jean Cohen, “Civil Society and Globalization: Rethinking the Categories,” in
State and Civil Society in Northern Europe: The Swedish Model Reconsidered,
ed. Lars Trägårdh (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 2.
(48.) Cohen, “Civil Society and Globalization,” 2.
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Baker, Vannesa - Imprisonment and The Democratic Process

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Baker, Vannesa - Imprisonment and The Democratic Process

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Imprisonment and the Democratic Process

The Politics of Imprisonment: How the

Print publication date: 2009

Imprisonment and the Democratic Process

Abstract and Keywords

The Transformation of U.S. Imprisonment

First, consider varying state‐level imprisonment rates. Currently, Louisiana

Second, the intensity and character of penal sanctioning varies dramatically

prison sits on a former plantation

North Dakota, Mississippi, Maine, Colorado, Maryland, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon,

American penal sanctioning is fragmented, multidimensional, and often

(p.7) Comparing Penal Regime Variation in Three Cases

Given these conditions, we might have expected state governments to respond

In addition, these particular states may tell us something important about

trends in American penal sanctioning and deeper trends in American democracy,

(p.9) Explaining Penal

Informed by political sociology, particularly the work of Theda Skocpol and

we see significant changes in the political order, we are likely to see

Comparative and historical methodology is used to develop these arguments, the

powers of the state to resolve social conflict, creating more exclusionary

By contrast, in the Washington case, political actors operate within a more

Key Findings: Deep Democracy, Less Coercion; ThinDemocracy, More

Perhaps more important, the research suggests a counterintuitive claim:

analysis suggests that at the aggregate level, depressed civic engagement,

By taking up these themes, this book aims to contribute to a sociological

Qualifying Penal Regimes

It is important to clarify that a state's penal regime, including its imprisonment

reform, parole reform, drug offenders, repeat offenders, sex offenders,

More important, I focus on imprisonment because the prison, although an early

Imprisonment captures something meaningful about the relationship between

(p.16) Crime Rates

There is no unmediated or pure experience of crime because it is a product of

subsequently leading whites to support and demand more punitive penal

Specifically, the political incorporation of African Americans may have played an

(p.20) New York provides a counterbalance to these states. It shares none of

Given these indicators of a somewhat limited public participation, it is surprising

by middle‐class professionals and other elites, made a serious challenge to New

Rationale and Implications of this Study

(p.23) Moreover, an understanding of the democratic process and its

In response to some of these pressures, many Western democracies have

more likely to rely on more coercive approaches to governance. An appreciation

(2.) Marc Mauer, “Comparative International Rates of Incarceration: An

(4.) Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prisoners in 2007,” 8.

(7.) Oregon Department of Corrections, “What Is Community Corrections,”

(8.) Judith A. Greene, Smart on Crime: Positive Trends in State‐Level Sentencing

(9.) Greene, Smart on Crime.

(10.) Greene, Smart on Crime.

(11.) For important exceptions, see recent work on subnational imprisonment

(17.) David Downes, Contrasts in Tolerance: Post‐War Penal Policy in the

(18.) U.S. Census Bureau, “Participation in Elections for President and US

Thomas Dumm, Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United

(23.) For a helpful discussion on a genealogical approach to historical material,

(25.) On the dehumanizing aspects of confinement, particularly the nearly total

(26.) BJS, “Prisoners in 2007,” available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/

(27.) BJS, “Prisoners in 2007,” 18.

(28.) BJS, “Prisoners in 2007,” 18.

(29.) BJS, “Prisoners in 2007,” 18.

(30.) BJS, “Prisoners in 2007,” 18.

(39.) Jeffrey S. Adler, “Introduction,” in African American Mayors: Race, Politics