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

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

In contrast to the meteoric rise of the previous four decades, the US has more recently witnessed a decrease in the number of citizens incarcerated over the past four years with over 2 million Americans incarcerated. The leveling off of incarceration has prompted some to announce the end of the prison boom. Despite this optimistic view, the Sentencing Project estimates that without sweeping sentencing reforms and policy changes it would take almost 90 years to return the prison population to its 1980 level. This panel will interrogate the social, political, and economic challenges to ending mass incarceration and the prison building boom. We ask broadly what are the causes and consequences of decarceration? Does a move towards decarceration signal an end to racial disparities in incarceration? Does decarceration impact other pillars of the carceral state like prison proliferation?

Sub Unit

• Section on Crime, Law and Deviance / The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End? Race and Decarceration

Session Organizer

• John Major Eason, Texas A&M University

Individual Presentations

• Penal Excess in the Age of Decarceration: Implications for Racial Inequality - Heather A. Schoenfeld, Northwestern University

• Reforming Mass Incarceration? An Agonistic Perspective on Contemporary Criminal Justice - Michelle S. Phelps, University of Minnesota; Joshua Aaron Page, University of Minnesota; Phil Goodman, University of Toronto

• Prisoner Reentry as a Social Institution - Reuben Miller, University of Michigan