Heather Schoenfeld

The transformation of America's penal order: A historicized political sociology of punishment

Comparative historical methods are used to explain the transformation of the U.S. penal order in the second half of the 20th century. The analysis of multiple state-level case studies and national-level narratives suggests that this transformation has three distinct, but interconnected, historical periods and reveals that the complex interaction between national and state-level politics and policy helps explain the growth in imprisonment between 1970 and 2001. Specifically, over time, national political competition, federal crime control policy, and federal court decisions helped create new state-level political innovation and special interest groups that compelled lawmakers to increasingly define the crime problem as a lack of punishment and to respond by putting more people in prison for longer periods of time. In turn, state-level developments facilitated increasingly radical crime control politics and policies at the national level that reflected historical traditions found in Sun Belt states.

Violated Trust: Conceptualizing Prosecutorial Misconduct

In the past decade, investigations into wrongful convictions have uncovered multiple incidents of prosecutorial misconduct during trial. This article proposes a theoretical explanation of prosecutorial misconductwith the goal of promptingfurther research. The theory builds from the characterization of prosecutors as agents of trust and prosecutorial misconduct as a violation of the norms of trust. Utilizing theories of occupational crime, the theory explains how the structure of the trust relationship creates motivation and opportunities for misconduct. Motivation to engage in misconductstems fromprosecutors’definitionsofsuccess, whichare influencedbythe reward structure and the availability of techniques of neutralization. Opportunities for misconduct arise because of the organization of the prosecutorial role and weak sanctions for prosecutors’misbehavior. Given the motivation and opportunity, prosecutors’ decision to engage in misconduct depends on their evaluation of existing opportunities, which is influenced by their workplace subculture and their values and beliefs.

The delayed emergence of penal modernism in Florida

Recently, punishment scholars have challenged the dominant historiography of a relatively uncontested period of penal modernism or penal welfarism across the USA between the Second World War and the 1960s. However, scholarship has not yet explained why penal modernism failed to take hold in particular regions and states. Using the social history of punishment in Florida, I argue that penal modernism failed to take hold in Florida for three reasons: the effect of political arrangements on the ability of political and bureaucratic actors to reform penal institutions; the timing of modern penal initiatives with the capacity of state bureaucracies; and the precedent that linked punishment policy and practices to cultural assumptions about ‘black labor’. The findings suggest that punishment scholars can draw on historical institutionalist scholarship in order to understand continuity and change in penality.

A Research Agenda on Reform: Penal Policy and Politics across the States

In the past 10 years, state legislatures from across the political spectrum have passed or considered reforms aimed at reducing prison populations. The breadth of reform challenges social science scholarship that views mass incarceration as “locked-in” by political, social, and economic forces and, as such, presents an important area of scholarly inquiry. In this article, I argue that new research on reform should be animated by a sociopolitical perspective on punishment that developed out of social science research explaining the rise of mass incarceration. In particular, I pose research questions, hypotheses, and potential methodologies related to (1) the causes of the new moment of reform; (2) the variation in reform efforts; and (3) the process, content, and political effects of reform. I conclude by briefly summarizing what we know about the underlying rationales and strategies of this new moment.