The purpose of this research is to advance the politics of mass imprisonment literature by testing and specifying the macro-explanations of the state-level incarceration change in the United States (U.S.) between 1980 and 2010. Specifically, I account for mechanisms of inter-party competition and public electoral pressure neglected in prior research. To accomplish this goal, I utilize random coefficient models designed to control for repeated annual measures of state-level data that overwhelm traditional analytic techniques. Findings suggest that violent crime, partisan affiliation of state legislators and governors, probation rates, citizen ideology, marijuana decriminalization, and recidivist-focused laws are associated with incarceration as hypothesized, as well as the African American presence net of crime and socioeconomic disadvantage. Contributing to the theoretical debates on democracy and punishment, this paper demonstrates that inter-party competition and public electoral pressure amplify incarceration in the context of Democratic Party dominance, where no liberalizing effects of competition were found. I conclude that legal and extralegal factors are associated with incarceration and suggest that the public did not oppose criminal justice expansion via democratic feedback mechanisms, so both penal populism (Pratt, 2008) and popular punitivism (Campbell et al., 2017) are valid interpretations of imprisonment politics during the analyzed period.
In legal science and practice, the term “legal regulation” often denotes various phenomena. This leads to a violation of the logical law of identity and theoretical difficulties. The article presents a description of four independent approaches to legal regulation: functional, narrow cybernetic, power-based, and content-specific. The functional understanding of legal regulation presents it as a kind of impact of the law on public relations, during which legal consequences arise, that is, changes in the rights, legitimate interests and obligations of subjects of law, narrow cybernetic - as the movement of administrative legal information from its generators to addressees, power-based - as the activities of a powerful subject to use legal means within the framework of procedures to ensure the onset of legal consequences; content and industry - as a set of texts of legal regulations, systematized by industry criterion. Each approach has a tradition of application. A functional understanding of legal regulation is the most conceptual and practically grounded.
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