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

Abstract

Mass incarceration is an unprecedented development, one with myriad adverse consequences. Although the expansion of US penal institutions is largely a function of changes in practice and policy rather than rising crime rates, reversing this trend will nonetheless be challenging. The need for comprehensive sentencing reform is clear, but political limits on legislative remedies and the failure of the courts to notably reduce the scale, or improve conditions, of confinement render these approaches highly uncertain. In the short term, unconventional methods that do not require legislative authorization, such as electing, pressuring, and incentivizing prosecutors to reduce penal severity, may be a promising way of addressing mass incarceration. The return and revitalization of parole or other systems of post-sentence review are also crucial and may be legitimated in terms of the need to incentivize rehabilitation and prevent the unnecessary and costly incarceration of the elderly. The recent mobilization of grass-roots movements for penal change that include those directly affected by both violence and mass incarceration is also auspicious, as their work may help to humanize the justice-involved and undermine the erroneous assumption that crime survivors are well-served by mass incarceration. 235

A Criminological Fly in the Ointment: Specialty Courts and the Generality of Deviance

“…Of course, the efficient processing of cases is certainly a legitimate concern. And all things being equal, moving offenders through the system more quickly may also serve to reduce the harms associated with being processed through the criminal justice system (Beckett, 2018). After all, as Feeley (1979) famously noted: The process is the punishment.…”

Sentence Length and Recidivism

“…() again forces readers to consider just how difficult an evidence‐based policy conversation is in the current political and policy environments. In a wonderfully authoritative and wide‐ranging review article that regularly keeps me up at night, Katherine Beckett () detailed the massive challenges to meaningful reductions in the scope, scale, and reach of the criminal justice system. The arguments are too lengthy to do justice to here, but what is clear from the review is just how large the disconnect is between what we know as criminologists and how policy reform occurs.…”

“…The most important implication of a policy like this is that it would allow the Bureau of Prisons to close facilities. It is a truism that prison beds will always be filled where they are available so facility closure is the best strategy to protect against the path dependence that has characterized many attempts to reduce the size and scope of incarceration in the United States (Beckett, ).…”

Mass incarceration and consumer financial harm: Critique of rent‐seeking by the carceral state

“…The management of crime, which had long been the province of local and state government, was reimagined as a prison industrial complex (PIC), a matrix of public and private institutions overseen by a massive carceral state (Selman and Leighton, 2010, 78). The PIC brought a market‐dominant logic to the long‐term management of criminalized populations, with a focus on urban youth, the drug‐addled, and the mentally ill (Thompson, 2010; Beckett, 2018).…”