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Joshua Guetzkow and BruceWestern Chapter II The Political Consequences of Mass Imprisonment With more than 2 million people behind bars and another 4 million under some form of correctional supervision, the scale of imprisonment in the United States is now unequaled in the world. Imprisonment has become a routine life event for the young, loweducation , mostly minority men who fill the nation's prisons and jails. The development of mass imprisonment also involved a significant shift in public resources. By 2001, public spending on prisons and jails totaled $60.3 billion, equal to federal antipoverty spending on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Earned Income Tax Credit. At the state level, prisons and jails consume over 3 percent of expenditures on average, more than double their share in 1970. The growth of the American penal system has had far-reaching effects on the poor urban communities that supply most of the nation's prison and jail inmates. The rapid rise in the incarceration rate has contributed a little to reducing crime in poor neighborhoods , but mass imprisonment also carries a significant social cost in the form of family disruption and diminished economic opportunity. Rather than integrate the most disadvantaged into the American mainstream, the growth of the penal system has functioned to divide society's outcasts-particularly young African American men with little schooling -from the commonwealth. Although trends in crime helped set the stage for mass imprisonment, the growth in incarceration rates was fundamentally a political development. From the late 1960s, the Republican Party developed law-and-order appeals as part of a new style of conservative politics that attempted to divide blue-collar whites from black voters. The right turn in Republican politics contributed to a realignment in which the GOP by the 1990s became the dominant party at the state and the national levels. The politics of law and order and the electoral success of the Republican Party transformed American criminal justice. The ideal of rehabilitation was discredited and retribution became a legitimate objective of penal policy. Prisons and jails were assigned the tasks of incapacitation and deterrence. As a consequence, control over criminal sentencing shifted from judges to legislatures, and tough new sentences were introduced for drug crimes and repeat offenders. Just as the prison boom emerged from a partisan realignment and a repudiation of government's rehabilitative role in the lives of the poor, the political consequences of the boom and the policies associated with it may be likewise fundamental. In this chapter, we situate the prison boom within the policy-centered perspective in three ways. First, we describe the political origins of mass incarceration, highlighting how the shift from indeterminate to determinate sentencing policies has altered the politics of crime and punishment . Second, we discuss how incarceration has eroded the economic and civic standing of the disadvantaged individuals, families, and communities that are disproportionately The Political Consequences ofMass Imprisonment 229 affected by the prison boom. Finally, we examine whether spending on state programs has been curtailed in the face of expanding prison budgets. THE POLITICS OF MASS IMPRISONMENT High rates of incarceration at the end of the 1990s were largely the products of policy choice. American criminal justice was transformed in the 1970s. Two political projects, the war on crime and the war on drugs, generated a new role for prisons, and a new array of offenses and procedures for criminal processing (Beckett 1997). In a time of rising crime and skepticism about rehabilitative programs, prisons were enlisted in their more punitive function-to incapacitate criminals who would otherwise be on the streets, and to deter those who are tempted to offend. If the wars on crime and drugs were the means, the key agent of change was the Republican Party. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968 pioneered the law-and-order appeals that peeled off traditional Democratic constituencies disaffected by civil rights reforms and the disorder of social protest. Political support for "tough-on-crime" policy galvanized opposition to the rehabilitative ideal. In the 1970s these political currents eroded long-standing rules of indeterminate criminal sentencing, which gave judges and parole boards control over punishment. The new model of "determinate sentencing" shifted control to legislatures, ensuring that criminal-justice policy would remain a significant issue in state political campaigns as candidates were forced to be more responsive to popular sentiment about crime. The Republican Party, Voter Realignment, and Mass Imprisonment Although the prison boom moved into high gear only in the 1980s...

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