HISTORICAL CONTINGENCIES AND THE EVOLVING IMPORTANCE OF RACE, VIOLENT CRIME, AND REGION IN EXPLAINING MASS INCARCERATION IN THE UNITED STATES

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12065
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• Author: JOSHUA WILLIAMS,MATT VOGEL,MICHAEL C. CAMPBELL
• Date: 01 May 2015

HISTORICAL CONTINGENCIES AND THE EVOLVING

IMPORTANCE OF RACE, VIOLENT CRIME, AND

REGION IN EXPLAINING MASS INCARCERATION IN

THE UNITED STATES∗

MICHAEL C. CAMPBELL, MATT VOGEL,

and JOSHUA WILLIAMS

Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University

of Missouri—St. Louis

KEYWORDS: incarceration, crime policy, penal policy, race, crime politics

This article combines insights from historical research and quantitative analyses that

have attempted to explain changes in incarceration rates in the United States. We use

state-level decennial data from 1970 to 2010 (N=250) to test whether recent theoretical

models derived from historical research that emphasize the importance of specific his-

torical periods in shaping the relative importance of certain social and political factors

explain imprisonment. Also drawing on historical work, we examine how these key

determinants differed in Sunbelt states, that is, the states stretching across the nation’s

South from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, from the rest of the nation. Our findings

suggest that the relative contributions of violent crime, minority composition, political

ideology, and partisanship to imprisonment vary over time. We also extend our anal-

ysis beyond mass incarceration’s rise to analyze how factors associated with prison

expansion can explain its stabilization and contraction in the early twenty-first century.

Our findings suggest that most of the factors that best explained state incarceration

rates in the prison boom era lost power once imprisonment stabilized and declined.

We find considerable support for the importance of historical contingencies in shaping

state-level imprisonment trends, and our findings highlight the enduring importance of

race in explaining incarceration.

The last four decades featured transformative shifts in crime control strategies in

the United States that ultimately generated a 450 percent increase in the nation’s

incarceration rate, one of the most striking products of the “get tough on crime”

era. Departing sharply from the nation’s history and the trajectories of all other

advanced democracies, U.S. states constructed the world’s largest network of prisons and

now incarcerate a greater proportion of their citizens than any other nation (Walmsley,

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2015.53.issue-2/issuetoc.

The authors would like to thank Lee Ann Slocum, Heather Schoenfeld, Janet Lauritsen, Rick

Rosenfeld, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Direct correspondence to Michael Campbell, University of Missouri—St. Louis, Department of

Criminology and Criminal Justice, 324 Lucas Hall, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63104

(e-mail: campbellmi@umsl.edu).

C2015 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12065

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 53 Number 2 180–203 2015 180

EXPLAINING INCARCERATION IN THE UNITED STATES 181

2011). This dramatic increase in imprisonment was not driven by a centralized national-

level strategy for dealing with crime and was not based on a coherent body of empirical

knowledge demonstrating that prisons improved public safety. Instead, it was the prod-

uct of layers of legislative decisions, primarily enacted at the state level, to charge and

imprison more offenders, increase sentences, limit prison releases, and expand incarceral

capacity. These decisions combined to create a new era in which prisons became primary

weapons in the nation’s war on crime.

This impressive expansion of the state’s power to apprehend, charge, convict, and im-

prison such a large proportion of its citizens unfolded against the backdrop of volatile

socioeconomic changes that included significant swings in violent crime, ongoing racial

tensions in the wake of civil rights reforms, and partisan dynamics that reshaped party

allegiances in key states, regions, and constituencies. Higher incarceration rates were not

merely the product of increasing crime—states built prisons even as crime declined, and

some continued to build them long after the sharpest decrease in crime in American his-

tory. Our temporal distance from the prison boom era and mass incarceration’s remark-

able resilience in American criminal justice now provide some valuable historical con-

text in seeking to understand the constellation of forces associated with incarceration’s

rise and relative stability. Because the policy decisions that shape prison populations are

largely (although not entirely) a function of state governments, the United States provides

50 independent cases for analysis. This decentralized federal structure has generated great

variation in how state governments responded to crime and considerable variation in the

timing of those changes, but the overall trend is undeniable—every state’s incarceration

rate increased by at least 150 percent from 1970 to 2000, and the median state increase

was 390 percent (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2012). Recent trends in declining incarcer-

ation rates in some states highlight the heterogeneity of state penal trajectories; we use

this variation to examine relationships among key social, economic, and political factors

and incarceration.

Scholars sought to explain incarceration’s growth by using quantitative analytic strate-

gies that analyzed state-level factors and their relationship to incarceration rates. This

research identified higher crime rates, racial composition, ideology, religious fundamen-

talism, fiscal resources, and partisanship as important factors in explaining state-level in-

carceration rates (Greenberg and West, 2001; Jacobs and Carmichael, 2001; Smith, 2004;

Spelman, 2009). By analyzing state-level changes, this body of work suggested that violent

crime was an important factor in explaining prison expansion, but so too were other social

and political factors linked to race, partisanship, and ideology. Another largely indepen-

dent strand of historical research emerged that studied similar questions by examining the

forces that shaped legal and policy changes within specific states. This historical scholar-

ship pointed to the importance of political culture, state structure, interest group activi-

ties, the role of federal courts, and partisan dynamics in explaining penal change (Barker,

2009; Campbell, 2011; Gilmore, 2007; Lynch, 2010; Page, 2011; Schoenfeld, 2010). Inte-

grating findings from these historical studies into a “new political sociology of punish-

ment,” Campbell and Schoenfeld (2013) have argued that the relative importance of

specific variables changes over time and must be understood as period specific. These

lines of research helped identify key forces that shaped incarceration’s rise and have done

much to explain how these mechanisms operated within certain historical conditions. This