Crime Law Soc Change (2015) 64:201–204 DOI 10.1007/s10611-015-9572-8 BOOK REVIEW
Todd Clear and Natasha Frost (au): “the punishment imperative: the rise and fall of mass incarceration” New York University Press, 2014 Geert Dhondt 1
Published online: 12 August 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
September 2014. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich publishes an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times to encourage California voters to vote yes on Proposition 47 (reducing six felonies to misdemeanors) because the United States should end the incarceration Bbinge^ and Proposition 47 will be a step in the right direction. Voters of California should send a message to the politicians: BUpdate your view of the electorate. This is not 1990 or 2000. It’s OK to do thoughtful criminal justice and prison reform. You won’t automatically be punished at the polls for saying Bno^ to a new prison or a new get-tough-on-crime measure^ [1]. Twenty years earlier, in September 1994, New Gingrich was one of the principle architects behind the BContract with America^ in which he argued, among other proposals, to Bstop violent criminals. Let us get in touch with an effective, believable, and timely death penalty for violent offenders. Let us also reduce crime by building more prisons, making sentences longer, and putting more police on the streets^ [2]. This promise was fulfilled with five new bills in 1995 and 1996 reforming sentencing, calling for new federal money for building new prisons, as well as additional law enforcement, and new death penalty reforms. Newt Gingrich, Congress, and President Clinton showed they were tough on crime and prison populations grew drastically. Fast-forward again to today as Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton swears to end mass incarceration, as we know it. In a speech on April 29, 2015, Clinton argues, BToday there seems to be a growing bipartisan movement for commonsense reforms in our criminal justice system. Senators as disparate on the political spectrum as Cory Booker and Rand Paul and Dick Durbin and Mike Lee are reaching across the aisle to find ways to work together. It is rare to see Democrats and Republicans agree
* Geert Dhondt
[email protected] 1
Department of Economics, John Jay College, The City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
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on anything today. But we’re beginning to agree on this: We need to restore balance to our criminal justice system. Now, of course, it is not enough just to agree and give speeches about it—we actually have to work together to get the job done.^ [3] Mass incarceration was the result of a great social experiment, the punishment imperative, and it has run its course, argue Todd Clear and Natasha Frost in this must-read and thought-provoking book, The Punishment Imperative: the Rise and Fall of Mass Incarceration [4]. Clear and Frost started writing a new book about mass incarceration in 2008. The book was going to be about the rise and consequences of mass incarceration drawing upon much of their independent and collaborative work. But a few years later when they were near to finishing the book they made a dramatic shift in their focus. They observed the first signs in the aftermath of the Great Recession and its subsequent sovereign debt crisis1 that the punishment imperative might be coming to an end. Clear and Frost argue that Ba combination of political shifts, accumulating empirical evidence, and fiscal pressures^ (3) has created a new criminal justice reform paradigm. But the road to the pre-incarceration binge is still long and difficult. This accessible book has seven chapters. The first chapter and last chapter argue that we are seeing the beginning of the end of mass incarceration, and how we should begin to consider and evaluate current efforts to dismantle mass incarceration. The five chapters in the middle cover the grand social experiment: the punishment imperative. I will focus on these chapters first and then return to the dismantling of the punishment imperative later in this review. The second chapter is an excellent overview of mass incarceration. It describes and illustrates the extent of U.S. social policy on incarceration and emphasizes many of its stylized facts. Clear and Frost describe how incarceration policy in the United States is different from the rest of the world: the United States has seen a seven fold increase while other countries have seen little increase since the 1970s. They discuss how this growth happened and how it is not related to crime. Mass incarceration’s impacts are also very specific and not everyone is impacted by these policies. The penal policies have a very different impact across different places, genders, classes, and racial groups. For example, Maine’s incarceration rate (per 100,000) in 2013 was 148 versus Louisiana’s of 847, while the national average for states is 395. This means that while Maine’s incarceration rate is 63 % lower than the national average, Louisiana’s is 114 % higher. States with high rates of incarceration are mainly focuses in the South (Louisiana, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas) [7]. But even within states the incarceration rate is very concentrated. Most prisoners are from poor young male minorities from urban neighborhoods. Over 90 % are male, nearly half are Black, and more than half of adult prisoners are under 35 years old (26). The next chapter argues that this unique social policy on incarceration can be best understood as a grand social experiment such as the New Deal and the Great Society. Clear and Frost argue that race and public fears of race and crime in the postsegregation era are at the core of this experiment. They argue that three points can be made about crime politics during this era. First, getting in touch with crime started in the South as a generalized reaction against the street demonstrations and civil rights. 1
See McNally (2011) and Kotz (2015) for excellent analyses of the crisis. [5, 6]
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This became a national agenda under Nixon and central to his campaign Btoward freedom from fear^ (62). The second point Clear and Frost convincingly make is that the foundation of the prison binge has nothing to do with crime but more with crime rhetoric, which of course is code for race. And third, that the punishment imperative has had a dramatic racial impact. Chapter Four goes into depth about the policies which created the grand social experiment. Clear and Frost divide the policies into different eras. The 1970s targeted crime, the 1980s targeted drugs, and the 1990s targeted repeat offenders, violent crime, and super-predators. The discussion in this chapter is mostly focused on changes in sentencing from early changes from indeterminate to determinate sentencing to mandatory sentencing, truth-in-sentencing, and three strikes laws. There is also substantive discussion on increased surveillance and importantly on the changes in post-release supervision. These policies are directly responsible for the massive growth of the prison populations in the United States, as they both increased the likelihood of going to prison, and of re-entering prison, as well as drastically increasing the length of stay. Increasing the number of people entering prison and increasing their length of stay is what Clear and Frost named the Biron law^ of prison populations. In the next two chapters, Clear and Frost first discuss two different views of why we are engaged in the punishment imperative: the traditional view and the critical criminologist view. The traditional view can be summarized by saying that much of the prison buildup has to do with responses to crime, respect for the law, attempts to bring back order, and to reduce crime. The alternative view suggests that the buildup is about managing economic problems through controlling people and not about preventing crime. Clear and Frost argue that we need both views to fully understand the punishment imperative. After a 40-year grand social experiment, Clear and Frost next make an assessment. Mass incarceration has been a total failure, they conclude. They argue that the punishment imperative has failed in at least four ways: that the incarceration rate is disconnected from the crime rate; that prison expansion has not met its own goals; that mass incarceration has not solved social problems but aggravated them; and that mass incarceration is a great example of how punishment and politics are tightly connected. In the last chapter, Clear and Frost return to the important discussion on how to dismantle the punishment imperative. They evaluate different reform attempts and conclude that most have failed to lower the incarceration rate. To lower the incarceration rate we need to reduce the number of people entering prison and reduce the length of their stay. This will require drastic and tough fights for politicians such presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. Clear and Frost lay out an agenda as to how we can reduce prison populations. They have three main suggestions for how to accomplish this: first, repeal mandatory sentences; second, reduce length of stay; and third, reduce recidivism. Much of the chapter is about methods on sentencing reform to reduce length of stay or justice reinvestment to reduce recidivism. Clear and Frost have helped start the most important conversation facing criminologists at the moment. How do we substantively reduce prison populations? They remind us that in order Bto have a significant impact on prison populations^ we have to confront Bthe main culprits behind the growth of incarceration^ head-on. BLength of stay has doubled since 1972, and the rate of felony sentencing to incarceration has changed from 25 % in 1972 to 75 % today^ (162). Clear and Frost have begun this most important conversation in this important book.
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References 1. Gingrich, N., & Hughes Jr., B. W. (2014). What California can learn from red states on crime and punishment. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com. 2. Congressional Record Volume 140, Issue 134. (1994). Speech by Newt Gingrich, BThe capitol steps contract and cynicism in Washington, DC.^. Washington, DC: GPO. 3. Clinton, H. (2015). Keynote Speech at the 18th Annual David N. Dinkins Leadership & Public Policy Forum. New York: Columbia University. Retrieved from https://sipa.columbia.edu/dinkins-forum and transcript retrieved from http://www.foxnews.com. 4. Clear, T. R., & Frost, N. A. (2014). The punishment imperative: the rise and fall of mass incarceration in America. New York: New York University Press. 5. McNally, D. (2011). Global slump: the economics and politics of crisis and resistance. Oakland: PM Press. 6. Kotz, D. M. (2015). The rise and fall of neoliberal capitalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 7. Corrections Statistics by State. National Institute of Corrections. Department of Justice. Washington, D.C. Retrieved from http://www.nicic.gov.
