Introduction: the collateral consequences of imprisonment.

• Author: Mauer, Marc

In these early years of the twenty-first century, the United States holds the dubious distinction of maintaining the world's largest prison system, both in absolute numbers and in per capita rate. (1) On a historical timeline, these are relatively new developments, with the six-fold explosion of the prison population having begun only in 1972. (2) Why and how these developments emerged is a complicated story. While some of the response can be traced to changes in crime rates, most scholars now attribute the bulk of the increase to changes in policy over the course of three decades. (3) This can be seen most directly in the profound changes in sentencing policy during this period--most prominently, the shift from indeterminate sentencing to more fixed and structured systems. (4) Had this shift been merely a means to control unwarranted judicial discretion and impose normative bases for sentencing ranges (as is the case in some states utilizing sentencing guidelines), the institutional impact might not have been so dramatic. But the increasing controls on judicial discretion were accompanied by broad philosophical and practical shifts in policy--under the general rubric of the "get tough" movement--that have led to the most extreme restrictions on discretion, in the form of mandatory sentencing, "three strikes and you're out" policies, and the like. With the additional dramatic changes brought about by the inception of the modern day "war on drugs" in the 1980s, the prison and jail population has swollen to more than two million Americans behind bars. (5)

These developments raise the challenging question of why the "get tough" movement emerged at this particular time, given that other options for addressing public safety were available and, indeed, are used to a much greater extent in other industrialized nations. Here we get into an examination of broader political trends--the growing conservative political climate in the United States that has affected not only crime policy but other areas of social policy as well, such as welfare and immigration. Sociologist David Garland contends that these changes reflect the political, social, and cultural environment of "late modernity" that "brings with it a cluster of risk, insecurities, and control problems that have played a crucial role in shaping our changing response to crime." (6) These dynamics affect United States policy most prominently, but can also be seen in the United Kingdom and other industrialized nations.

The end result of these changes, a world record prison population, should be cause for concern in itself. After all, the irony of the wealthiest society in history holding a record number of prisoners at great social and fiscal cost should surely be viewed as a troubling phenomenon, regardless of one's political perspective. Further, as an increasing body of research demonstrates, there is considerably less of a direct correlation between higher rates of imprisonment and lowered crime than is often assumed. (7) Indeed, as Professor Jeffrey Fagan, Valerie West, and Jan Holland describe in this Volume, in high-imprisonment neighborhoods, incarceration may not simply be "a consequence of neighborhood crime, but instead may transform into an intrinsic part of the ecological dynamics of neighborhoods that may actually elevate crime within neighborhoods."

This Symposium also demonstrates that the impact of high rates of incarceration goes well beyond the tally of the number of individuals behind bars. In a complex set of ways both old and new, the collateral consequences of imprisonment now force us to examine the impact of these policies in ways that we are just beginning to analyze and understand.

There are a variety of questions and categories of analysis that need to be explored within the context of collateral consequences, or what we might think of as the "additional" effects of a prison sentence (or in many cases, just a felony conviction). For a start, there is a distinction between those collateral effects that are legislatively or otherwise directly imposed on offenders and those effects on one's life prospects that result from a conviction even if not directly imposed as public policy.

Looking at the impact of a prison sentence on an individual, for example, it is clear that having a prison...