Historical Contingencies and the Evolving Importance of Race, Violent Crime, and Region in Explaining Mass Incarceration in the United States

Abstract

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.

Cumulative impact: Why prison sentences have increased*

“…The findings from prior macro‐level work indicate that some determinants of imprisonment carried more weight during different eras. For instance, violent crime was a stronger determinant of imprisonment rates in the 1980s and 1990s than it was in the 2000s (Campbell, Vogel, & Williams, ). Furthermore, a tenable hypothesis extending from the focal concerns model and the move toward risk aversion (Feeley & Simon, ; Garland, ) is that judges have placed greater weight on community protection, and as such, the magnitude of the criminal history coefficient may have increased over time.…”

The Politics, Promise, and Peril of Criminal Justice Reform in the Context of Mass Incarceration

“…This conclusion is based mainly on studies that decompose the criminal justice process into its constituent parts to trace shifts in the criminal justice system response to reported crimes and show that the system response to crime rather than crime trends was the main engine of prison growth (see, e.g., Blumstein & Beck 1999, Raphael & Stoll 2013. Although regression-based studies fairly consistently show that violent crime rates (and the size of the black population) are significant predictors of higher incarceration rates across US states (Campbell et al 2015, Greenberg & West 2001, Jacobs & Carmichael 2001, Spellman 2009, studies that use a decomposition methodology to analyze the drivers of prison growth over time suggest that the impact of crime trends has been quite modest relative to the impact of changes in policy and practice. For example, on the basis of their decomposition and simulations, Raphael & Stoll (2013, p. 70) conclude "nearly all (if not all) of the growth of the state and federal prison populations can be attributed to tougher sentencing policy.…”

Mass probation: Toward a more robust theory of state variation in punishment

“…A prominent trend in this literature is to compare imprisonment rates across U.S. states, noting that punishment is often structured by regional, demographic, and political factors (Lynch, 2011). Quantitative researchers analyzing state-level time-series data have found that expansions of imprisonment are correlated with crime rates and drug arrest rates; racial diversity; state revenues and spending patterns; and dominance of the Republican party (Campbell, Vogel, & Williams, 2015; Phelps & Pager, 2016). Much of this research highlights the punitive nature of punishment in the South and the Sunbelt, where imprisonment rates are high and punishment is “cheap and mean” (Lynch, 2009).…”