This article combines insights from historical research and quantitative analyses that have attempted to explain changes in incarceration rates in the United States. We use state-level decennial data from 1970 to 2010 (N = 250) to test whether recent theoretical models derived from historical research that emphasize the importance of specific historical periods in shaping the relative importance of certain social and political factors explain imprisonment. Also drawing on historical work, we examine how these key determinants differed in Sunbelt states, that is, the states stretching across the nation's South from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, from the rest of the nation. Our findings suggest that the relative contributions of violent crime, minority composition, political ideology, and partisanship to imprisonment vary over time. We also extend our analysis beyond mass incarceration's rise to analyze how factors associated with prison expansion can explain its stabilization and contraction in the early twenty-first century. Our findings suggest that most of the factors that best explained state incarceration rates in the prison boom era lost power once imprisonment stabilized and declined. We find considerable support for the importance of historical contingencies in shaping state-level imprisonment trends, and our findings highlight the enduring importance of race in explaining incarceration.

Burgeoning research on criminal case processing has revealed persistent effects of the race and ethnicity of defendants on case outcomes up to and including imprisonment. But prior studies have devoted relatively little attention to how the characteristics of the communities in which crimes are committed affect imprisonment and antecedent legal outcomes such as bail amount and pretrial detention. Guided by the group threat and focal concerns perspectives, the current study examines the impact of community racial and socioeconomic composition on the likelihood that African American male defendants are sentenced to prison rather than probation for firearm offenses in a large Midwestern city. We find that defendants arrested in neighborhoods with higher proportions of non-poor residents received higher bail and, in turn, spent more time in jail and were more likely to be sentenced to prison than those arrested in lower status neighborhoods. We find no significant effect of neighborhood racial composition on bail, pretrial confinement, or imprisonment. We recommend that the community context of crime receive high priority in future research on the impact of extralegal factors on imprisonment.

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The current study begins to answer the recent call for scholars to reinvigorate the use of observational data to understand courtroom decisions. Drawing on the psychological effects of decision fatigue, the current study examines 284 bail hearing cases from two New Jersey jurisdictions to explore the role of decision fatigue on judges’ engagement, judicial deviations from prosecutors’ recommendations, and set bail amounts. The results suggest that judicial fatigue, measured as case order and session duration, limited the engagement for one judge, affected set bail amounts for both judges, and that proceeding modality may play some role in fatigue and engagement. Findings also suggest that observational data can work in tandem with administrative data to give better insight into the court process and decisions. Limitations and future research are discussed.