Making Punishment Pay

Abstract

Sociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative and quantitative data from California, circa 1960–2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging of debt overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment and resistance to paying taxes for building prisons. The leveraging of bond debt deferred and externalized the costs of building prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged and extended this debt and dispensed with the requirement for direct voter approval. A Republican-dominated punishment regime capitalized debt to build prisons in selected exurban Republican California counties with growing visible minority populations. We demonstrate that the innovative use of lease revenue bonds was the essential element that enlarged and extended funding of California prison construction by an order of magnitude that made this expansion a boom. With what Robert Merton called the consequences of imperious interest, this prison expansion enabled the imprisonment of an inordinately large and racially disproportionate inmate population.

Layered Sites of Environmental Justice: Considering the Case of Prisons*

“…More recently, Hagan et al. (2015) confirm this framing, demonstrating the way the state of California leveraged debt to fund the state‐wide prison boom. Other scholars note that those same political‐economic conditions, with an emphasis on the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and 1980s, have produced bleak economic circumstances in which communities seek development to stimulate growth and increase local jobs (Gottschalk 2016; Lobao and Adua 2011).…”

Performing Social Control: Poverty Governance, Public Finance, and the Politics of Visibility

“…From that point forward, LRBs achieved full dominance over prison construction funding. "Once bitten" by voters rejecting a GOB initiative, policymakers were more than twice shy, authorizing five more LRB appropriations for prison construction, totaling around $3 billion over the next decade (Hagan et al 2015). Indeed, low-visibility LRBs provided the funding for every subsequent construction initiative as California's prison-building boom continued through the 1990s (Hagan et al 2015).…”

Reclaiming the Prison Boom: Considering Prison Proliferation in the Era of Mass Imprisonment

“…For example, prison building is a phenomenon that disproportionately impacts rural, southern communities (Eason ). This complex and nuance process is reduced to a foregone conclusion from the northern, urban perspective typified by most activist, journalist, and scholars alike (Davis ; Hagan et al ; Huling ; King et al . ; Schlosser ).…”

“…For example, prison building is a phenomenon that disproportionately impacts rural, southern communities (Eason 2010). This complex and nuance process is reduced to a foregone conclusion from the northern, urban perspective typified by most activist, journalist, and scholars alike (Davis 2003;Hagan et al 2015;Huling 2002;King et al 2003;Schlosser 1998). This singular perspective is problematic given that states are considering reducing their overreliance on imprisonment and some have placed a moratorium on building and even closed facilities.…”

“…Two other studies are built from the state‐level political economy approach of Gilmore. Hagan et al () build on Gilmore in arguing the state of California's leveraged debt as a matter of fiscal policy to fund prison, the prison boom. Like Gilmore (), the role of the state is highlighted, whereas locals where prisons are built are reduced to a function of racial threat.…”