Selective Incapacitation and Public Policy: Evaluating California's Imprisonment Crisis

Notes

171 NOTES NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Analysis of the complex political and psychological processes that govern the acceptance or rejection of a particular paradigm is beyond my scope of inquiry. My task is to identify criminal justice paradigms as they have manifested themselves in criminal justice sentencing policy as a precursor to the empirical objective of the study, the evaluation of the impacts of policy choices on prison populations. 2. This task has been quite admirably undertaken by a number of contemporary scholars, including Nigel Walker (1991); Andrew von Hirsch (1976, 1985); Herbert L. Packer (1968); Norval Morris (1974); Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins (1995); Thomas Mathiesen (1990); and H.L.A. Hart (1968), to name just a few. 3. Another important difference is the period of study—many of the large-scale research projects on sentencing policy reform (e.g., Clear 1994; Wichayara 1995; Zimring and Hawkins 1995) only analyze data up through the early 1990s, well before the implementation of its most dramatic sentencing reforms, such as Three Strikes. 4. It is true that the California penal system underwent a great deal of programmatic and structural reform under the direction of Richard A. McGee, the first director of the state’s Department of Corrections (Glaser 1995). However, these reforms did not have any real paradigmatic significance, in that all of McGee’s reforms were directed toward the goal of rehabilitating and reintegrating offenders into society. 5. A more subtle point here is that dangerousness is ultimately a probability—to say that an individual is more dangerous than another is to say that one individual has a higher probability of being dangerous than another.The same point (although expressed somewhat more laboriously) holds for populations: what we are really claiming is that one population is more likely than another to have a greater or lesser number of individuals with a greater or lesser probability of behaving dangerously in the future. 6. Dynamic systems models have also been used to simulate various aspects of illicit drug use. Some of these models focus on large-scale drug-distribution networks (Childress 1994a, 1994b; Dombey-Moore, Resetar, and Childress 1994), while others model populations of drug users (Hanneman and Jacobsen 1992). 7. This perspective derives, in large part, from Thomas C. Schelling’s (1978) observation that any number of different processes may, in fact, lead to similar outcomes. 8. Explaining these differences, while a worthwhile endeavor, is beyond the scope of this analysis. Many researchers do attempt to explain them (e.g., Irwin 1985; Meyers 1987; Bridges and Steen 1998), and the reader interested in the reasons such differences exist is referred to these authors. For my purposes, these differences are merely noted as “social facts” and incorporated into the modeling strategy in an effort to reproduce system dynamics as accurately as possible. 9. I make this explicit disclaimer in a perhaps futile attempt to safeguard against incorrect interpretations of the modeling strategy I employ.The most sensitive attribute essential to this modeling process is that of race: while race is related (with varying degrees of strength) to transition probabilities in the criminal justice system, race is not incorporated into the measure of dangerousness.This issue is discussed further in chapter 5. 10. This period spans the earliest and latest dates for which detailed electronic validation data are available from California state criminal justice agencies. 11. Evaluating changes in the average level of dangerousness in correctional populations that result from particular changes in sentencing practices is an informative exercise even if such reforms were not explicitly concerned with incapacitating dangerous offenders. Understanding the impact of particular policy changes on the distribution of dangerous offenders in the population is useful, insofar as crime reduction (by whatever specific mechanism, e.g., deterrence, incapacitation) is considered as an objective of criminal sentencing at all. 12. I would also term this tradition the “social constructionist” school. NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. Spierenburg (1995) points out that although prisons are at the forefront of most people’s perceptions of the criminal justice system, “the most common judicial sanction is a fine (usually for violating traffic rules)” (Spierenburg 1995:61). 2. There is precedent for this usage of the paradigm framework; Bertram et al.’s (1996) work on drug policy contains an analysis of paradigms in American criminal justice. 3. Interestingly, although the modern prison was essentially an innovation of the rehabilitative paradigm, successive penal paradigms have done little to challenge its dominance. Explaining the persistence of...