Penal Excess in the Age of Decarceration: Implications for Racial Inequality

• In Event: 536 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Paper Session. The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End? Race and Decarceration

Abstract

Since 2006, almost all 50 states have engaged in some type of penal policy reform aimed at reducing prison populations. The wave of reform seems surprising in light of the endless ratcheting up of prison sentences, supervision terms, and punitive rhetoric over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s. In this paper, I offer a sketch of how to understand recent state policy reforms. Using descriptive data on all 50 states and multiple state case studies, I argue that the recent flurry of reforms are a reaction to the recession and the specter of federal court intervention – which together have convinced legislators and governors that the penal status quo is untenable. The resulting reforms are shaped by new players in the penal field, including conservative Republicans and criminal justice technical assistance providers, both of whom advocate “evidence-based” solutions to more cost-effectively “manage” correctional populations. I argue, therefore, that we are witnessing a shifting of mass incarceration to accommodate the prohibitive cost of penal excess and that this new moment continues to reaffirm many of the racist assumptions underlying mass incarceration. In particular, lawmakers still believe that violent offenders are irredeemable and that being soft on crime is a political liability. As a result, they have largely avoided discussing the moral dilemmas inherent in the overuse of incarceration – namely, the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans.

Author

• Heather A. Schoenfeld, Northwestern University