Punishment in Polarized Times: Legislative Gridlock and Decreases in State Incarceration Rates

• In Event: The New Reality of American Imprisonment

Abstract

Explanatory accounts of U.S. penal expansion concur that consensus among political actors contributed to mass incarceration. Recent studies using federal data, however, suggest that incarceration rates may have been slowed by polarization in the legislative environments responsible for making criminal law. This analysis capitalizes on recently collected sentencing reform data at the state-level to assess how much political elite polarization in state legislatures contributed to the temporally checkered and spatially uneven patterns of criminal sentencing reforms across the states. It further assesses the indirect effects of political elite polarization on state incarceration rates acting through two policy mechanisms: criminal justice spending and sentencing reform. It uncovers three key findings. First, increases in political elite polarization since the 1990s are associated with gradual, long-term decreases in state incarceration rates. Second, state sentencing reforms are less likely to be adopted in politically polarized states. Third, the negative effect of political elite polarization on state incarceration rates is explained by reduced criminal justice spending in politically polarized states, not changes to sentencing policy. These findings support the legislative gridlock hypothesis of long-term declines in state incarceration rates and suggest that the policy machinery responsible for mass incarceration remains largely intact.

Author

• Scott Duxbury, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill