ABOUT THIS BOOK
The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world—about 1 in 100 adults, or more than 2 million people—while national spending on prisons has catapulted 400 percent. Given the vast racial disparities in incarceration, the prison system also reinforces race and class divisions. How and why did we become the world’s leading jailer? And what can we, as a society, do about it?
Reframing the story of mass incarceration, Heather Schoenfeld illustrates how the unfinished task of full equality for African Americans led to a series of policy choices that expanded the government’s power to punish, even as they were designed to protect individuals from arbitrary state violence. Examining civil rights protests, prison condition lawsuits, sentencing reforms, the War on Drugs, and the rise of conservative Tea Party politics, Schoenfeld explains why politicians veered from skepticism of prisons to an embrace of incarceration as the appropriate response to crime. To reduce the number of people behind bars, Schoenfeld argues that we must transform the political incentives for imprisonment and develop a new ideological basis for punishment.
REVIEWS
“Schoenfeld masterfully merges punishment and race theories to explain how state punitive policies and practices not only endure over time and space, but are dramatically expanded through carceral capacity—a state’s ability to punish by creating new criminal justice institutions. This is a must-read for anyone thinking deeply about the racial politics of criminal justice policy and potential solutions for prison reform.”
— John Eason, Texas A&M University, author of Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation
“Schoenfeld’s meticulously researched Building the Prison State is a major contribution to our understanding of mass incarceration. Schoenfeld conveys the horrors of the US punishment system, while at the same time capturing the most basic fact that this horror—and the racism at its core—is routine. Rather than focus on the agendas of conservatives, or liberals, she rightly focuses on the massive increase in carceral capacity that both have developed through new reforms that expand our ever-growing system of policing, parole, probation, and prisons. This is an indispensable book.”
— Naomi Murakawa, Princeton University, author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America
"Nuanced and complicated. . . . Schoenfeld’s flexible approaches toward reform intent, and [her] nimble shifts from macro- to micro-levels of analysis, are promising."
— Law and Social Inquiry
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1. A New Perspective on the Carceral State
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226521152.003.0001
[mass incarceration;carceral state;carceral capacity;penal policy;race;racial projects]
This chapter introduces the core claims, concepts, and contributions of the book. It argues that mass incarceration was not inevitable. Policymakers had to choose to build state capacity to arrest, process, and punish people deemed criminal. Examining decisions to build carceral capacity provides a new way to understand the development of the carceral state, or the network of people and institutions responsible for the United States’ system of criminal punishment. A political developmental perspective draws attention to the interaction of national and subnational policy and politics in creating the carceral state. It also contributes to current debates about the role of crime, media, and public opinion in fostering politicians’ support for punitive policies. Finally, this perspective incorporates the role of race in the development of the carceral state through the device of racial projects, or collective actors’ response to historical racial hierarchies, which inform policymakers’ penal policy decisions.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 2. Penal Modernization in the Civil Rights Era, 1954–1970
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226521152.003.0002
[penal modernization;bureaucratization;white supremacy;Law Enforcement Assistance Administration;St. Augustine, Florida;federalization;police reform]
This chapter documents the growth of carceral capacity during the Civil Rights era. It argues that Florida policymakers engaged in a process of penal modernization that was part of a larger state modernizing project that stemmed from racial conflict. The chapter explains how reformers drew on federal resources to develop new hiring and training requirements for police, create new state-level criminal justice bureaucracies, and implement new standards for corrections agencies. In addition, it details how Florida agencies spent Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grants between 1969 and 1979. The chapter concludes that penal modernization changed ideas about the federal and state (as opposed to local) role in crime control, significantly increased the ability of the state to arrest and process those deemed “criminal,” and created new interest groups that reinforced the role of criminal justice in social policy. While penal modernization included new progressive programs, it ultimately created the foundation on which politicians built the punitive carceral state.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 3. Prison Overcrowding and the Legal Challenge to Florida’s Prison System, 1970–1980
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226521152.003.0003
[prison conditions;litigation;Civil Rights Movement;cause lawyering;8th Amendment;Costello v. Wainwright;Louie Wainwright;Tobias Simon;prison overcrowding]
This chapter describes the origins and initial developments around Costello v. Wainwright, the 8th Amendment lawsuit against Florida’s prison system. The chapter argues that prison conditions litigation grew out of the Civil Right Movement. In addition, it demonstrates how the federal court’s definition of the problem as prison “capacity” and the white supremacist racial project shaped state officials’ options for legal compliance. Finally, it reveals how reformist corrections bureaucrats used the court order to demand more resources for state prisons.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 4. The Unintended Consequences of Prison Litigation, 1980–1991
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226521152.003.0004
[prison overcrowding;prison conditions litigation;crime;sentencing guidelines;rehabilitation;War on Drugs;Bob Graham;Bob Martinez;capacity]
This chapter describes Florida state officials’ compliance with the court order to reduce prison overcrowding. Civil Rights lawyers had high hopes that prison conditions litigation would reduce Florida’s reliance on imprisonment. Initially legislators opposed building new prisons and passed sentencing guidelines meant to slow the growth of prison admissions. This chapter answers why, less than ten years later, Florida officials decided to comply with the court order by building more prisons, rather than finding alternatives to incarceration. It argues that when prison admissions began to soar because of the War on Drugs, Republican Governor Bob Martinez used the threat of releasing inmates early to overcome legislators’ reservations about high prison costs, appropriate prison sites, and the limits of prison rehabilitation. The chapter reconsiders the effect of national crime control politics, crime, and punitive public opinion on state lawmakers’ decisions to expand prison capacity during the 1980s.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 5. The Politics of Early Release, 1991–1995
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226521152.003.0005
[early release;vicitms' rights;sheriffs;Stop Turning Out Prisoners;sentencing;prosecutors;racial representation;Democrats;Lawton Chiles;news media]
This chapter argues that the early 1990s were a turning point in the development of the carceral state. It demonstrates that lawmakers in Florida could have decided not to build more prisons. However, their earlier choices to build prisons and release offenders before the expiration of their sentences created a political opportunity for law enforcement organizations. Law enforcement argued, largely through the news media, that the state was protecting criminals’ rights at the expense of crime victims’ right to more prison space for criminal offenders. In an increasingly competitive partisan environment, the attention to the problem of “early release” caused legislators from both political parties to support longer prison terms and more prisons. In addition, the chapter argues that Democratic lawmakers’ resolve to oppose prisons was weakened by national Democrats’ move away from traditional liberal solutions to crime and by black leaders’ embrace of racial representation and racial uplift as means to address the unfinished legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 6. Republicans, Prosecutors, and the Carceral Ethos, 1995–2008
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226521152.003.0006
[Republicans;governing through crime;carceral ethos;prisons;symbolic politics;truth-in-sentencing;prosecutors;Jeb Bush;Charlie Crist]
This chapter describes the punitive political consensus, or “carceral ethos,” that had developed by the mid-1990s and examines the consequences for Florida politics and penal policy. It argues that that investments in prison capacity created the potential and the ability for newly dominant Republican lawmakers to “govern through crime” where crime control legislation became symbolic politics. Republicans’ ability to pass their crime control agenda was facilitated by the structure of the state legislative process. In turn, the carceral ethos and Republican control of the state legislature empowered public prosecutors to re-write the state’s sentencing laws to emphasize prison time for low-level offenders. Finally, the chapter argues that the move away from the project for racial equality and the racialization of crime and victimhood made it easier for white lawmakers and the public to accept the carceral ethos that offenders were expendable. Yet, it also made it difficult for black lawmakers and their allies to oppose harsh crime control policies.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 7. Recession-Era Colorblind Politics and the Challenge of Decarceration, 2008–2016
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226521152.003.0007
[Great Recession;Tea Party;prison conditions;racial disparity;prison town;corrections officers;prison reform;criminal justice]
This chapter discusses policy reform between 2008 and 2016 in the context of the Great Recession, Tea Party politics, the decreased salience of crime, and the high costs of incarceration. The chapter argues that Tea Party politics led to reform efforts by Florida conservatives and worsening conditions inside of prisons. It further finds that the colorblind project of the recession era precluded racial disparity in imprisonment or the collateral consequences of racialized imprisonment as a policy problem. In addition, it describes the challenges to reform created by the persistence of the carceral ethos, the complexity of penal policy after years of expansion, and the entrenched interests created by the growth of carceral capacity.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter 8. Toward a New Ethos
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226521152.003.0008
[racial project;partisan politics;federalism;proceduralism;decarceration]
This chapter concludes by summarizing the story of prison growth in Florida and the political developmental perspective on the carceral state. Additionally, it discusses the implications of the story of Florida for explanations of the carceral state. In particular, it highlights the role of racial projects, partisan politics, federalism, and proceduralism. It also discusses broad lessons for decarceration reform. Finally, it calls for a new ethos on which to base crime control and punishment.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
