The politics of prison expansion.
Item
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Title
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The politics of prison expansion.
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Identifier
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AAI9732906
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identifier
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9732906
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Creator
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Davey, Joseph.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Frances Fox Piven
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Political Science, General | Political Science, Public Administration | Sociology, Criminology and Penology
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Abstract
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In the last two decades there has been an unprecedented increase in imprisonment in the United States. This expansion of imprisonment did not happen in other Western Democracies and, more importantly, it happened unevenly among the fifty states. Why was there such variation among the fifty states? Was it associated with increased rates of reported crime in each state? Are there socio-economic variables that are salient for prison growth?;The literature on the subject of variations in imprisonment patterns is limited. Three theories have been offered to explain the growth of imprisonment. The first could be called the "Durkheim-Blumstein" tradition, the second is the "Marxist-Rusche and Kircheimer" tradition and a third is the "racial-bias" theory. The first argues that a society's crime rate determines it's imprisonment rate; the second argues that economic factors are salient for imprisonment rates. The "racial-bias" theory suggests that the war-on-crime is really a war on African-Americans.;However, the increases in the levels of imprisonment cannot be explained completely by any one of these theories alone, nor all them together. In this study the rate of imprisonment increase in the fifty states was correlated with the increase in the crime rate in those states. It was then correlated with six other socio-economic variables which researchers often associate with high imprisonment rates. The correlational coefficients were low enough to warrant further investigation of the causes of the variation.;Therefore, from a list of states that had high rates of increase in imprisonment, the state with an imprisonment rate increase greater than any of it's neighbors was selected from six different regions of the U.S. The governor who had presided over the most rapid increase in the imprisonment rate in those states was identified. That governor's political views and rhetoric concerning crime and punishment were analyzed.;My hypothesis is that neither crime rates nor any other socio-economic variables are as important in explaining the variations in the rate of imprisonment expansion as is the "law and order" politics of individual governors. Moreover, while both formal and informal processes are at work in prison expansion, the informal processes may be the more significant.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
