The political analysis of mass incarceration

Date31 December 2010
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2010)0000053008
Pages111-135
Published date31 December 2010
AuthorPeter Hovde
THE POLITICAL ANALYSIS
OF MASS INCARCERATION
Peter Hovde
ABSTRACT
The past several decades have seen a tremendous increase in the U.S.
incarceration rate, with varying trends in other advanced industrial
democracies. These developments have only recently begun to attract the
attention of political scientists. This chapter provides a critical review of
recent literature on mass incarceration by both political scientists and
scholars in related disciplines, and a discussion of directions for further
research. I argue that further work in this area should involve
theoretically informed analysis of interactions between criminal justice
experts and professionals, elected politicians, and the public at large, with
particular attention to how public concerns about crime are parsed and
interpreted by public officials in the making of penal policy.
INTRODUCTION
It is a key insight of modern social science that politics and law are
inextricably bound up with violence and coercion (see Weber, 1958;Cover,
1986). The violent and coercive aspects of legal and political systems have
not, however, been greatly emphasized in the social science scholarship
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 53, 111–135
Copyright r2010 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1108/S1059-4337(2010)0000053008
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dealing with the law and politics of advanced industrial democracies.
Notwithstanding this scholarly occlusion of the more brutal side of political
life, recent developments in the United States and elsewhere have made it
difficult to treat violence as a background, taken-for-granted aspect of social
order and politics. In the past few decades, the United States and, to a lesser
extent, several other advanced industrial democracies have seen a drastic
expansion of the use of more overtly coercive and violent methods of social
control, particularly the use of incarceration (International Center for
Prison Studies, 2010). The U.S. incarceration rate has almost quadrupled in
the years since 1975 (Gottschalk, 2006) and recently attained the benchmark
of having 1 in every 100 adults in some form of incarceration (Warren,
2008).
The United States remains extraordinary among industrial democracies in
its expanded use of incarceration, and now incarcerates a higher percentage
of its population than any other nation in the world. During the last several
decades, however, incarceration rates have also risen in several other
industrial democracies, including Great Britain and the Netherlands, while
the use of incarceration has held constant or even decreased in others, such
as Canada and Denmark, during the same time period (International Center
for Prison Studies, 2010). Contemporary mass incarceration in the United
States can thus be located within a pattern of variation across a relatively
short historical period and across a set of broadly similar countries. In
addition to the normative concerns raised by the tremendous increase in the
U.S. incarceration rate, such changes and contrasts in policy and resource
allocation should be of interest to scholars and students of American and
comparative politics, as well as to those working in the fields of social
control and criminal justice.
The politics of crime and punishment have traditionally received relatively
little attention from academic political scientists, although there have been
notable exceptions.
1
Since the 1990s, however, a number of scholars, both in
political science and in allied disciplines such as sociology and law, have
undertaken explicitly political critical analyses of social control develop-
ments in the United States during recent decades. This chapter offers a
critical discussion of this literature, and proposes a framework for further
inquiry, with a particular emphasis on how causal analyses of punitive
trends may benefit from approaches drawn from the political science
discipline, notwithstanding that disciplines’ relative inattention to the
subject. I review foundational works concerned with broad trends toward
mass incarceration and a more generally punitive penal politics, and
undertake a critical interrogation of some of the conceptual categories and
PETER HOVDE112

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