Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T14:30:16.723Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

19 - Politics, Institutions, and the Carceral State

from III - The State and Its Political Organizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2020

By
Joachim J. Savelsberg  and
Amber Joy Powell
Edited by
Thomas Janoski ,
Cedric de Leon ,
Joya Misra  and
Isaac William Martin
Thomas Janoski
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
Cedric de Leon
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Joya Misra
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Isaac William Martin
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Get access

Summary

Carceral states rely on incarceration of an exceptionally large number of their citizens, typically accompanied by a diversity of supplemental methods of criminal justice control. The United States of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is such a carceral state. In the words of political scientist Marie Gottschalk (2015: 1): “a tenacious carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment and has been extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country’s vast archipelago of jails and prisons, but also the far-reaching and growing range of penal punishments and controls that lies in the never-never land between the prison gates and full citizenship.” And indeed, jails and prisons in America today are supplemented by expanding probation and parole systems, community sanctions, drug courts, immigrant detention and deportation, public stigmatization of released sex offenders, and the disenfranchisement of ex-felons.

Keywords

incarcerationpenal statepunishmentcriminal justicecultureinstitutionalism
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Handbook of Political Sociology , pp. 513 - 537
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Barker, Vanessa. 2009. The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Beckett, Katherine. 1997. Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Beckett, Katherine, Reosti, Anna, and Knaphus, Emily. 2016. “The End of an Era: Understanding the Contradictions of Criminal Justice Reform.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 664(1): 238–259.Google Scholar
Bendix, Reinhard. 1974 [1949]. Higher Civil Servants in American Society. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Berdejo, Carlon and Yuchtman, Noam. 2013. “Crime, Punishment, and Politics: An Analysis of Political Cycles in Criminal Sentencing.” Review of Economics and Statistics 95(3): 741–756.Google Scholar
Black, Donald. 1983. “Crime as Social Control.” American Sociological Review 48(1): 34–45.Google Scholar
Brace, Paul and Boyea, Brent. 2008. “State Public Opinion, the Death Penalty, and the Practice of Electing Judges.” American Journal of Political Science 52(2): 360–372.Google Scholar
Campbell, Michael C. 2012. “Ornery Alligators and Soap on a Rope: Texas Prosecutors and Punishment Reform in the Lone Star State.” Theoretical Criminology 16(3): 289–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Michael C. and Schoenfeld, Heather. 2013. “The Transformation of America’s Penal Order: A Historicized Political Sociology of Punishment.” American Journal of Sociology 118(5): 1375–1423.Google Scholar
Comfort, Megan. 2008. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dagan, David and Teles, Steven M.. 2014. “Locked In? Conservative Reform and the Future of Mass Incarceration.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 651: 266–276.Google Scholar
Davis, Angela. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press.Google Scholar
Downes, David. 2001. “The Macho Penal Economy: Mass Incarceration in the United States – a European Perspective.” Punishment & Society 3(1): 61–80.Google Scholar
Dzur, Albert, Loader, Ian, and Sparks, Richard (eds.). 2016. Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Enns, Peter. 2016. Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Forman, Jr., James. 2017. Locking up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.Google Scholar
Fortner, Michael Javen. 2015. Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Law and the Politics of Punishment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gallo, Zelia Anna, Lacey, Nicola, and Soskice, David. 2014. “Comparing Serious Violent Crime in the US and England and Wales: Why It Matters, and How It Can Be Done.” LSE Legal Studies Working Paper 16: 1–28.Google Scholar
Garland, David. 1990. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Garland, David. 2010. Peculiar Institution: The Death Penalty in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Goodman, Philip, Page, Joshua, and Phelps, Michelle. 2017. Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle over Criminal Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gottschalk, Marie. 2015. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Grasmick, Harold, Cochran, John K., Bursick, Robert J. Jr., and Kimpel, M’Lou. 1993. “Religion, Punitive Justice, and Support for the Death Penalty.” Justice Quarterly 10(2): 289–314.Google Scholar
Green, David A. 2008. When Children Kill Children: Penal Populism and Political Culture. Clarendon Studies in Criminology Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, David F. and Humphries, Drew. 1980. “The Cooptation of Fixed Sentencing Reform.” Crime and Delinquency 26: 206–225.Google Scholar
Guetzkow, Joshua and Schon, Eric. 2015. “If You Build It, They Will Fill It: The Consequences of Prison Overcrowding Litigation.”Law & Society Review 49(2): 401–432.Google Scholar
Heath, Linda and Gilbert, Kevin. 1996. “Mass Media and Fear of Crime.” American Behavioral Scientist 39(4): 379–386.Google Scholar
Heydebrand, Wolf V. 1990. “The Technocratic Organization of Academic Work” pp. 271–320 in Calhoun, C., Meyer, M. W., and Scott, W. R. (eds.) Structures of Power and Constraint: Papers in Honor of Peter M. Blau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hinton, Elizabeth. 2016. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs, David and Carmichael, Jason T.. 2002. “The Political Sociology of the Death Penalty: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis.” American Sociological Review 67(1): 109–131.Google Scholar
Jacobs, David and Carmichael, Jason T.. 2003. “The Politics of Punishment across Time and Space: A Pooled Time Series Analysis of Imprisonment Rates.” Social Forces 80(2): 725–755.Google Scholar
Jacobs, David and Helms, Robert E.. 1996. “Toward a Political Model of Incarceration: A Time Series Examination of Multiple Explanations for Prison Admission Rates.” American Journal of Sociology 102: 323–357.Google Scholar
Jacobs, David and Jackson, Aubrey L.. 2010. “On the Politics of Imprisonment: A Review of Systematic Findings.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6: 129–149.Google Scholar
Johnson, Devon. 2008. “Racial Prejudice, Perceived Injustice, and the Black-White gap in Punitive Attitudes.” Journal of Criminal Justice 36(2): 198–206.Google Scholar
King, Ryan D., Massoglia, Michael, and Uggen, Christopher. 2012. “Employment and Exile: U.S. Criminal Deportations, 1908–2005.” American Journal of Sociology 117(6): 1786–1825.Google Scholar
King, Ryan D. and Wheelock, Darren. 2007. “Group Threat and Social Control: Race, Perceptions of Minorities, and the Desire to Punish.” Social Forces 85: 1255–1280.Google Scholar
Lacey, Nicola. 2008. The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
LaChance, Daniel. 2016. Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lempert, Lora Bex. 2016. Women Doing Life: Gender, Punishment, and the Struggle for Identity. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Lerman, Amy and Weaver, Vesla M.. 2014. Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Light, Michael T., Massoglia, Michael, and King, Ryan D.. 2014. “Citizenship and Punishment: The Salience of National Membership in U.S. Criminal Courts.” American Sociological Review 79(5): 825–847.Google Scholar
Lynch, Mona. 2010. Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lynch, Mona. 2016. Hard Bargains: The Coercive Power of Drug Law in Federal Court. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Manza, Jeff and Uggen, Christopher. 2008. Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Massoglia, Michael. 2008. “Incarceration, Health, and Racial Disparities in Health.” Law & Society Review 42(2): 275–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Melossi, Dario. 2001. “The Cultural Embeddedness of Social Control: Reflections on the Comparison of Italian and North American Cultures Concerning Punishment.” Theoretical Criminology 5: 403–424.Google Scholar
Miller, Lisa L. 2016. The Myth of the Mob Rule: Violent Crime and Democratic Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Miron, Jeffrey A. 1999. “Violence and the U.S. Prohibition of Drugs and Alcohol.” American Law and Economics Review 1(1): 78–114.Google Scholar
Mohammad, Khalil Gibran. 2011. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Muller, Christopher. 2012. “Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarceration, 1880–1950.” American Journal of Sociology 118(2): 281–326.Google Scholar
Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. 1974. “The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion.” Journal of Communication 24(2): 43–51.Google Scholar
Owens, Emily Greens. 2011. “Are Underground Markets Really More Violent? Evidence from Early 20th Century America.” American Law and Economics Review 13(1): 1–44.Google Scholar
Page, Joshua. 2011. The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in California. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pager, Devah. 2003. “The Mark of a Criminal Record.” American Journal of Sociology 108(5): 937–975.Google Scholar
Petersilia, Joan and Cullen, Francis T.. 2015. “Liberal but not Stupid: Meeting the Promise of Downsizing Prisons.” Stanford Journal of Criminal Law and Policy 2(1): 1–43.Google Scholar
Pfaff, John. 2017. Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration – and How to Achieve Real Reform. New York: Hachette Books.Google Scholar
Phelps, Michelle S. 2016. “Possibilities and Contestation in Twenty-First-Century U.S. Criminal Justice Downsizing.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 12: 153–170.Google Scholar
Phelps, Michelle S. 2017. “Mass Probation: Toward a More Robust Theory of State Variation in Punishment.” Punishment & Society 19(1): 53–73.Google Scholar
Phelps, Michelle S. and Pager, Devah. 2016. “Inequality and Punishment: A Turning Point for Mass Incarceration?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 663(1): 185–203.Google Scholar
Pratt, John. 2002. “The Globalization of Punishment.” Corrections Today 64(1): 64–68.Google Scholar
Reiter, Keramet. 2016. 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Reuband, Karl-Heinz. 2003. “Steigende Repressionsneigung im Zeitalter der ‘Postmoderne?’ Das Sanktionsverlangen der Bundesbüger 1989 und 2002 im Vergleich.” Neue Kriminalpolitik 15: 100–115.Google Scholar
Rhodes, Lorna. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum-Security Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Julian V. and Sprott, Jane B.. 2008. “Exploring Differences between Punitive and Moderate Penal Policies in the United States and Canada” in Kury, Helmut and Ferdinand, Theodore N. (eds.) International Perspectives on Punitivity. Bochum: Brockmeyer.Google Scholar
Rubin, Ashley T. 2015. “A Neo-Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion.” Law & Society Review 49(2): 365–399.Google Scholar
Sampson, Robert J. and Wilson, William J.. 1995. “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality” pp. 37–54 in Hagan, John and Peterson, Ruth D. (eds.) Crime and Inequality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Savelsberg, Joachim J. 1992. “Law that Does Not Fit Society: Sentencing Guidelines as a Neo-classical Reaction to the Dilemmas of Substantivized Law.” American Journal of Sociology 97(5): 1346–1381.Google Scholar
Savelsberg, Joachim J.. 1994. “Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment.” American Journal of Sociology 99(4): 911–943.Google Scholar
Savelsberg, Joachim J.. 1999. “Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment Revisited: Incorporating State Socialism.” Punishment & Society 1(1): 45–70.Google Scholar
Savelsberg, Joachim J.. 2002. “Cultures of Control in Contemporary Societies” (review essay of David Garland’s The Culture of Control). Law & Social Inquiry 27(3): 685–710.Google Scholar
Savelsberg, Joachim J.. 2004. “Religion, Historical Contingencies, and Criminal Law: The German Case and Beyond.” Law & Social Inquiry 29(2): 373–401.Google Scholar
Savelsberg, Joachim J., Cleveland, Lara L., and King, Ryan D.. 2004. “Institutional Environments and Scholarly Work: American Criminology: 1951–1993.” Social Forces 82: 1275–1302.Google Scholar
Savelsberg, Joachim J. and Flood, Sarah M.. 2011. “Collins Meets Criminology: Global Theory of Intellectual Change and a Policy-oriented Field.” Sociological Forum 26: 21–44.Google Scholar
Schoenfeld, Heather. 2010. “Mass Incarceration and the Paradox of Prison Conditions Litigation.” Law & Society Review 44(3/4): 731–768.Google Scholar
Seeds, Christopher. 2016. “Bifurcation Nation: American Penal Policy in Late Mass Incarceration.” Punishment & Society 18: 1–21.Google Scholar
Simon, Jonathan. 2007. Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Philip. 2008. Punishment and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sutton, John R. 2000. “Imprisonment and Social Classification in Five Common-Law Democracies, 1955–1985.” American Journal of Sociology 106(2): 350–386.Google Scholar
Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51(2): 273–286.Google Scholar
Tonry, Michael. 1995. Malign Neglect. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tonry, Michael. 2001. “Symbol, Substance, and Severity in Western Penal Policies.” Punishment & Society 3(4): 517–536.Google Scholar
Tyler, Tom R. and Boeckmann, Robert J.. 1997. “Three Strikes and You Are Out, but Why? The Psychology of Public Support for Punishing Rule Breakers.” Law & Society Review 31: 237–265.Google Scholar
Uggen, Christopher, Manza, Jeff, and Thompson, Melissa. 2006. “Citizenship, Democracy, and the Civic Reintegration of Criminal Offenders.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 605(1): 281–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ulmer, Jeffery T. and Bradley, Mindy (eds.). 2017. Punishment Decisions: Locations of Disparity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
van Cleve, Nicole Gonzalez. 2016. Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc. 2002. “The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto.” Theoretical Criminology 4: 377–389.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Wakefield, Sara and Uggen, Christopher. 2010. “Incarceration and Stratification.” Annual Review of Sociology 3(6): 387–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wakefield, Sara and Wildeman, Christopher. 2011. “Mass Imprisonment and Racial Disparities in Childhood Behavioral Problems.” Criminology & Public Policy 10: 793–817.Google Scholar
Weaver, Vesla M. 2007. “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy.” Studies in American Political Development 21: 230–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Western, Bruce. 2002. “The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality.” American Sociological Review 67(4): 526–546.Google Scholar
Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Western, Bruce and Wildeman, Christopher. 2009. “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 621: 221–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitman, James. 2003. Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Zimring, Franklin. 1996. “Populism, Democratic Government, and the Decline of Expert Authority.” Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository 28: 243–256.Google Scholar
Zimring, Franklin E. and Johnson, David T.. 2006. “Public Opinion and the Governance of Punishment in Democratic Political Systems.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 605(1): 266–280.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×