Michael C. Campbell

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.

HISTORICAL CONTINGENCIES AND THE EVOLVING IMPORTANCE OF RACE, VIOLENT CRIME, AND REGION IN EXPLAINING MASS INCARCERATION IN THE UNITED STATES†

This article combines insights from historical research and quantitative analyses that have attempted to explain changes in incarceration rates in the United States. We use state-level decennial data from 1970 to 2010 (N = 250) to test whether recent theoretical models derived from historical research that emphasize the importance of specific historical periods in shaping the relative importance of certain social and political factors explain imprisonment. Also drawing on historical work, we examine how these key determinants differed in Sunbelt states, that is, the states stretching across the nations South from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, from the rest of the nation. Our findings suggest that the relative contributions of violent crime, minority composition, political ideology, and partisanship to imprisonment vary over time. We also extend our analysis beyond mass incarcerations rise to analyze how factors associated with prison expansion can explain its stabilization and contraction in the early twenty-first century. Our findings suggest that most of the factors that best explained state incarceration rates in the prison boom era lost power once imprisonment stabilized and declined. We find considerable support for the importance of historical contingencies in shaping state-level imprisonment trends, and our findings highlight the enduring importance of race in explaining incarceration.

Ornery alligators and soap on a rope: Texas prosecutors and punishment reform in the Lone Star State

This article presents historical data on changes in punishment policy in Texas, examining how Texas’s prosecutors played an important role in shaping law and policy. This article helps parcel out the relative influence of various factors in driving more punitive policies by examining an unsettled period of legal and policy change when some state leaders were pushing back against the growing tide of prison expansion. Ultimately this period resulted in a new penal code that retained most of the harshest punishments for offenders, and created an additional layer of prison facilities to manage lower-level offenders. My findings emphasize how these legal changes reflected conflict between state and local government. It also suggests that important contextual factors deeply embedded in Texas’s history helped establish conditions more likely to lead to mass incarceration. These findings suggest that ‘top–down’ and ‘bottom–up’ theoretical accounts of punishment might omit important intervening institutional factors.

Criminal disenfranchisement reform in California A deviant case study

The United States denies voting rights to ex-convicts, parolees, probationers and prisoners on a scale unmatched among democratic nations. State laws establishing voting eligibility vary markedly from no disenfranchisement in some states, to permanent disenfranchisement in others. Existing research suggests that more exclusive laws are associated with larger percentages of nonwhites in the State’s general population and in states with higher percentages of nonwhite prisoners. Little historical research exists explaining how and why certain states have retained disenfranchisement while others have revised these laws. This article adopts a deviant case analysis framework, where California is examined as a seemingly exceptional example of reform in order to refine existing explanations of disenfranchisement. Through extensive archival research and a content analysis of a key media source, this article explains how and why California changed its disenfranchisement laws in 1974, a year existing research would predict a punitive legal shift. The findings suggest that repeal of disenfranchisement may be linked to the activities and framing strategies of reformers, particularly African-American legislators, the presence of advocacy organizations and political context. This research also suggests that media coverage of criminal justice policy issues is an important factor in the political feasibility of reform.

Punishment for Homicide in Europe Research Challenges and a Roadmap for Progress

This study examines punishments for homicide in Europe by compiling national-level data and presenting a descriptive account of variation. We present original data collected from various European data sources and individual researchers and highlight the problems associated with cross-national data on homicide and the limitations this poses for research. Based on available data, we offer some preliminary observations regarding regional trends in homicide and incarceration rates for homicide. Finally, we provide some suggestions for how these problems might be overcome moving forward.

Is the pendulum swinging? Crime, punishment, and the potential for reform in the USA

After a steady and sometimes brisk decades-long march toward increasingly harsher approaches to dealing with crime and criminal offenders, some high ranking policy makers seem to be reconsidering the logic and utility of this approach. Senator Jim Webb’s introduction of the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 in March suggests that at least on the federal level, the costs of the perpetual wars on crimes and drugs are being critically examined. Other state-level reforms have also emerged, some reinstating voting rights for former convicts, others releasing low-level offenders in efforts to lower the costs of incarceration, which suggest that a reform movement might be afoot. Two recent texts, After the war on crime: Race, democracy, and a new reconstruction, edited by Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney Lopez, and Jonathon Simon, and Locked out: Felon disenfranchisement and American democracy by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, offer important insights into a possible reorientation in the notion of justice in the USA. After the war on crime, presents a critical assessment of the nation’s wars on crime and drugs, and offers suggestions for directions to heal the rifts left in their wake. This perfectly timed book contains 13 independent articles authored by many of the authoritative experts on crime policy, punishment, and race across the sociological and criminological spectrum. Divided into three sections, the book first addresses ‘Crime, war, and governance’, which examines the nature of the prison and governing poverty, the war on crime and its impact on Mexico, the USA’s policy shift from social welfare to the war on crime, and an illuminating assessment of the lessons learned from nation’s

Homicide and Punishment in Europe: Examining National Variation

This chapter examines punishment for homicide in Europe by analyzing statistical data on how various nations sanction homicide offenders. It presents a general survey of existing data on the complex and varied ways that European nations punish these serious offenders, revealing considerable variation across the continent. Officially, most European nations retain very long periods of incarceration, usually life imprisonment, as the sanction for the most serious homicide infractions. But in practice, few offenders are ever prosecuted and sentenced under the law’s most serious infraction. Instead, many European homicide offenders are sentenced for 10–20 years, and rarely serve full terms due to a variety of penal and administrative processes that mitigate incarceration during the punishment phase. This is less the case in English speaking nations and in Eastern European countries. The United Kingdom and the Russian Federation impose long prison sentences on many homicide offenders, and are increasingly turning to life sentences. Although data limitations severely limit any comprehensive assessment of punishment for homicide in Europe, this chapter helps sketch general trends, and raises questions about how to explain the considerable differences found across the continent.

The demographic divide: Population dynamics, race and the rise of mass incarceration in the United States

This manuscript examines whether certain fundamental demographic changes in age structures across racial groups might help explain incarceration rates in the United States. We argue that a “demographic divide”—a growing divergence in the age structures of blacks and whites—was an important factor that contributed to the nation’s rising incarceration rates. Where age disparities between blacks and whites were higher ideological conservatism and religious fundamentalism increased, as did incarceration rates. We contend that historical forces shape how groups respond to subsequent social problems and proposed solutions to them and explore how “generational effects” may shape law and policy. Specifically, we suggest that states with older white and younger black populations created fertile conditions for a more punitive brand of politics and penal policy. We analyze decennial state-level data from 1970 to 2010 and examine whether differences in the median ages of blacks and whites contributed to changing incarceration rates within states over time. We situate our findings within the broader scholarship that has engaged the complex links between race, religion, political conservatism, and punishment. Our findings illustrate the importance of accounting for long-term shifts in social structure in understanding more proximate changes in law and policy.

Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment

who have their own sets of interests. In addition to catering to foreigners, does Gurgaon cater to elite Indians? I also wonder whether place does matter, but in a different way— does the fact that these call centers have British and U.S. clients and are located in an Indian city, as opposed to a city in another country, matter? Do the historical connections and legacies of British colonialism facilitate their successful creations? Aneesh also weaves together natural and social science empirical research to analyze the unintended consequences of call center work hours, which are in line with the time zones of their customer bases, including restrictions to family life, transportation problems, and physical effects. Aneesh points out at the end of Chapter Five that these problems are not something limited to call center employees. Yet, it is also not something that is necessarily ‘‘new’’ in this era of increasing interconnectedness. Many people with lower socio-economic status have engaged in varied forms of night work— whether prostitution, janitorial services, security/police work, volunteer social services (e.g., hotlines), or fast food—for decades. On one hand, the increasing speed and interconnectedness of the current age of globalization involves the proliferation of such work to new realms and increasing numbers of jobs, as Aneesh contends. On the other hand, to what extent have poor, minority, and women workers experienced such night shifts and their unintended consequences while also maintaining families? Do the call workers of his study represent a shift of this type of work to the relative middle class and more educated in India? How might this align with shifting priorities with regard to balancing work, family, and ambition? In Neutral Accent, Aneesh has produced a well-written, clear, and concise manuscript that unravels how communication actually works in so-called centers of cross-cultural interaction. He provides several important and creative contributions to our knowledge about globalization, inequality, identity construction, and work, and does so by locating the multiple disconnections that are reproduced when people of different groups virtually meet. Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment, by Hadar Aviram. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 252 pp.

Book Review: Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy; The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons

29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520277311.