Money and mass incarceration: The bad, the mad, and penal reform*

• Published date: 01 February 2009
• Author: Marie Gottschalk
• Date: 01 February 2009
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2009.00547.x

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POLICY ESSAY

Money and mass incarceration: The bad, the mad,

and penal reform*

Marie Gottschalk

University of Pennsylvania

Spelman’s (2009, this issue) analysis calls into question the popular con-

tention among many antiprison activists and other penal reformers that

the U.S. prison boom is bound to end soon because states just cannot

afford it anymore. States have had extremely deep pockets to build more

prisons even in hard times, and the availability of state revenues to pay for

more prison beds has been a leading engine for prison growth. States spent

more money on prisons between 1977 and 2005, but they also spent more

on lots of other items, such as education and health care. Leaving aside the

current financial crisis, the United States has had three major economic

downturns since the early 1980s. These downturns made no dent whatso-

ever in the nation’s incarceration rate, which continued to increase steeply

through good times and bad. Spelman’s analysis implies that it would take

a truly enormous economic contraction that drastically hit state spending

across the board to cause the nation’s extraordinarily high incarceration

rate to plateau or turn downward. For anyone troubled by mass incarcera-

tion in the United States, this analysis looks like a dismal picture of what,

if anything, can be done to reverse the prison boom, except perhaps to

pray for a wrenching and protracted economic contraction.

But an alternative policy prescription embedded in Spelman’s (2009)

analysis is far less fatalistic. In addition to ample funds to pay for more

cells, Spelman identifies two other factors as key in explaining why the

U.S. prison population has been escalating for more than 35 years with no

end in sight: an increasing crime rate and tougher sentencing policies. He

casts doubt on alternative explanations that attribute the U.S. prison boom

primarily to underlying social and economic conditions, like poverty,

unemployment, failing schools and failing families (as measured by high-

school dropout rates and out-of-wedlock births), income inequality, and

* Direct correspondence to Marie Gottschalk, Department of Political Science,

University of Pennsylvania, 217 Stiteler Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6215 (e-mail:

mgottsch@sas.upenn.edu).

CRIMINOLOGY & Public Policy

Volume 8 Issue 1 Copyright 2009 American Society of Criminology

97