Big Prisons, Big Dreams (review)

This book joins a now rather-crowded field of recent studies on mass incarceration in the United States since the 1980s. What distinguishes it is largely Michael Lynch’s orientation as a radical criminologist, a viewpoint that separates his work from many of the contributions rooted in sociology.

The book falls into three unequal parts that are only loosely integrated. The first and longest section questions the effectiveness of mass incarceration: is bigger, better? Here the criminologist’s approach sets the agenda. Are U.S. prisons an effective means of crime control? Do the avowed aims of incapacitation (depriving offenders of future opportunities for crime) and deterrence (discouraging would-be offenders from committing crime) justify the rapid and unprecedented increase in incarceration rates? Lynch provides one extended study of incarceration rates and corresponding crime rates in a state-by-state comparison across the 1990s. The results seem decidedly mixed, since rising rates of incarceration are accompanied in some places with decreasing, but in other places with increasing, crime. Lynch cites a broad array of studies that suggest similar conclusions; in his words, “the impact of incarceration is not uniform, and, because of these uncertainties certainly should not become the basis of crime policy.”(13) It is a frustrating feature of his argument, however, that he largely avoids entering into the technical details of such studies. To spare the reader having to slog through complex statistical analyses, he simply reports results culled from various studies, leaving the reader to trust his summary of the research. His real target in this first section seems to be “conservative” criminologists and other ideologues who have pushed a tough-on-crime agenda and promised big returns (“big dreams”) from bigger prisons. In Lynch’s view, such big dreams are an illusion generated by a selective and biased use of evidence: “conservative policy makers latched onto short term aberrations to present a rosy picture of imprisonment’s crime suppression potential.”(74) Lynch demonstrates that the research findings are not rosy. He does little, however, to explain how conservatives came to dominate the policy discussions. Indeed there is little or no analysis of the policy-making arenas in criminal justice in the past decades. Lynch may actually weaken the force of his argument by casting the matter in ideological terms, as if conservatives had simply hoodwinked politicians and the public alike by over-ambitious claims and extravagant promises.

The second part of the book turns to explaining what drove the rise in incarceration rates. Lynch draws little from the range of recent sociological studies attempting to analyze mass incarceration (few are even listed in his bibliography). His approach rather is to resuscitate the “materialist” explanation developed by Rusche and Kirchheimer in their classic 1939 study Punishment and Social Structure that broadly tied penal policies and practices to conditions in the labor market. Lynch acknowledges that several periods in recent decades don’t seem to fit the pattern described by Rusche and Kirchheimer. While the economic downturn of the mid-1970s was accompanied by growth in the U.S. prison system (as their analysis might have predicted), “the economic recovery experienced during the late 1980s and 1990s did not have the expected impact on the incarceration rate;” indeed the incarceration rate “continued to rise in the face of expanded economic and labor market conditions.”(117) Lynch accordingly introduces new wrinkles into the structural argument to fit the trends. He suggests, for example, that “the wage decline associated with the transformation from an industrial to a service economy indicates that a very broad form of economic marginalization was affecting even employed workers.”(129) In Lynch’s reformulation, “as the conditions of the lowest free social class deteriorates (sic), the conditions of punishment should become harsher.”(232) Growing inequality and a larger marginalized population thus would swell the prison population. Mass incarceration accordingly appears to be a policy of “class control” and given the racial disparities in the United States likewise “race control.” Whatever the merits of such an argument...