Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment.

• Author: Pfaff, John F.
• Position: Book review

Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment. By Hadar Aviram. Oakland: University of California Press. 2015. Pp. xiii, 252. Cloth, $75; paper, $29.95.

Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. By Marie Gottschalk. Oxford and Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2015. Pp. xiv, 474. Cloth, $35; paper, $24.95.

INTRODUCTION

By now, the stratospheric, forty-year rise in the U.S. prison population is well known. From the mid-1970s to 2010, the U.S. prison population steadily and relentlessly rose from around 250,000 to 1.6 million; (1) the incarceration rate from around 120 per 100,000 to 510 per 100,000 (and to over 700 per 100,000 when counting those locked up in jails as well as prisons). It was a surge unprecedented in American history and unseen elsewhere in the world. The U.S. incarceration rate in the 1970s was comparable to those in Europe and Canada. But by the 2010s, the United States had earned the dubious distinction of being home to 5% of the world's population but nearly 25% of the world's prisoners.

In 2010, however, for the first time in four decades, the U.S. prison population began to decline. The drop has not been great--just under 3%--and some observers predict that total populations could still rise by as much as 3% by 2018. (2) But the decline has nonetheless been remarkable, not just because it ended years of constant growth, but because it reflected a rare moment of true bipartisanship. At both the state and federal levels, Democrats and Republicans alike advocated for reforms aimed at restraining or even reducing prison populations. (3) Solidly blue states like California and deeply red ones like Georgia and Mississippi enacted significant reforms, (4) and both houses of Congress have introduced reform bills with bipartisan sponsorship. (5)

A major question reformers raise, however, is how long will this bipartisan moment last? Many find the timing of reforms--most of which followed the (2008) financial crisis--not coincidental. The assumption is that conservative support for reform is driven primarily by the desire to save money during a time of tight state budgets and low crime rates. (6) The obvious fear is that if the economy recovers, vital conservative support may dissipate. And this fear is not unfounded: there was concerted talk about prison reform in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble popping in 2000, but as the economy recovered, reform efforts fell by the wayside (Gottschalk, p. 25).

Two recent books on prison growth directly address the relationship between penal change and economic conditions: Hadar Aviram's Cheap on Crime and Marie Gottschalk's Caught. (7) Aviram's is the more optimistic of the two accounts, arguing that there is at least some potential in an economic-based reform effort. Gottschalk, on the other hand, fears not only that economic-based efforts could fail to lead to significant reforms, but that they could actually make prison life worse for inmates if states cut funding and support without cutting populations. Both books make many provocative points, but both also suffer from some surprising omissions. Ultimately, both books, and Gottschalk's in particular, are likely too pessimistic about economic-based reform, although for reasons that neither book adequately addresses.

I focus on two major themes in this Review. First, what exactly is the relationship between the current fiscal crisis and prison reform? While it is clear that the crisis has helped to push legislators and governors to enact some important reforms, it is perhaps unexpectedly unclear why this is. The fraction of state spending given to prisons is actually surprisingly low, suggesting that even in a time of tight state budgets, cutting back on prison populations will not help state budgets much. Instead, contrary to the narrative that both Aviram and Gottschalk provide, the story of postcrisis reform is likely more one of politics (and the political cover provided by the crisis) than of economic necessity. Surprisingly, this could actually be a reason to be optimistic that reform efforts will survive an economic recovery.

The second issue I consider is narrower: the impact of private prison firms on prison reform. Both Aviram and Gottschalk view these firms, and their attendant lobbying, as major threats to reform efforts. And the fear is understandable. These firms earn profits off the number of inmates they hold, so they have an incentive to lobby hard to keep those numbers high. At first blush, their lobbying efforts appear significant. But upon closer inspection, this concern is overstated. The correlation between relying on private prisons and state prison growth is weak, and it is hard to isolate the marginal importance of private prison lobbying from lobbying by all the other often-public groups with incentives to push for tougher sentencing practices as well. Moreover, to the extent that private prisons do impede reform, the problem isn't with their for-profit status (which is what alarms Aviram and Gottschalk), but with the poorly designed contracts that states sign with them.

Before jumping into these two issues, I just want to stress that both books, Gottschalk's in particular, examine many more issues than just the fiscal ones that I examine here, and it would take another Review of equal length to give them the attention they deserve. Gottschalk's, for example, emphasizes that real reform requires changing how we treat violent offenders (an essential point that almost no politician has yet been willing to admit), persuasively argues that it is problematic to talk about reentry but not address the root causes of the initial failure, and discusses race and punishment in a particularly nuanced and sophisticated way (Gottschalk, Chapters Eight, Four, and Seven). That is not to say that I agree with every claim in the book, but this is not the place to go into those disagreements. (8) My focus here is just on the fiscal part, (9) which I turn to now.

1. THE FISCAL CRISIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR REFORM

   According to the conventional wisdom about the causes of and solutions to prison growth, the financial crisis that started in 2008 has created a major opportunity to implement real reforms. It is a logical assumption to make. Crime is at a forty-year low while correctional spending is at an all-time high, giving legislatures a strong incentive to cut back on spending, and thus (perhaps!) on prison populations. (10) Bolstering this claim is the fact that the first decline in total prison populations since 1973 occurred in 2010, with declines persisting through 2014 (despite a slight uptick in 2013). (11)

   Yet the reality of incarceration growth is often far more complicated than the conventional wisdom suggests, (12) and both Aviram and Gottschalk confront the conventional account of fiscal crisis and reform head on. Both are deeply skeptical of its likely impact, although in different ways, and the concerns they raise generally demand attention. At the same time, both Aviram and Gottschalk miss the extent to which, I think, the current fiscal-based reform effort is not actually about fiscal issues. The financial aspect of reform may be more of a smokescreen than it gets credit for, and once framed this way, there is more reason to be optimistic--and pessimistic--about the future of reform. But let us first look more closely at the concerns that Aviram and Gottschalk raise.

   1. The Limited Power of Fiscal-Based Reform

      As both Aviram and Gottschalk note, the total amount states have spent on corrections has risen in tandem with soaring incarceration rates. Figure 1A plots state spending on incarceration (for prisons, in real 2012 dollars) alongside the U.S. prison population. (13) The nearly $50 billion states spend on prisons is a striking number; county governments spend an additional $30 billion on jails'4 (which yields the widely cited $80 billion). In an era of austerity and low crime, prison spending seems like a logical budget item to scale back.

      Gottschalk, however, puts that number in an often-overlooked context. While $80 billion is vast in absolute value, it comes to only 2% of the $3.6 trillion that state and county governments spent in 2012; if we look at spending on corrections, policing, and the court system--to account for counties spending much more on policing than corrections--then total criminal justice expenditures still come to just about $213 billion, or slightly under 6% of total spending. (15) In other words, as Gottschalk cautions, for as much as we spend on corrections, we might not spend enough for budgetary pressures to make much of a real difference (Gottschalk, pp. 8-9).

      Moreover, the level of correctional spending has been fairly constant for a while now, as we can see in Figure IB, which plots correctional spending as a share of total discretionary spending. (16) From the late 1970s to 1991, as both crime and prison populations were rising, so too was corrections' share of the budget. But as crime leveled out in 1991, corrections' share did as well. To be clear, Figure IB masks some variation across states--in about twenty-one states, spending leveled off by 1991 (in about sixteen states right around 1991), and in another twenty-one, growth continued through to 2001 (with perhaps a slight slowdown around 1991) and leveled off at that point, with corrections' share continuing to rise even after 2001 in just eight states. (17) But the basic story from Figure IB is that correctional spending, as a share of the budget, has been stable and fairly low for many years.

      Gottschalk further argues that not only is corrections' share of the budget too low to exert much pressure on policymakers, but that there are plenty of other reasons to assume that whatever sort of fiscal pressures states feel will not translate into real reforms. First, she is one of the few commentators to stress that...