Abstract
Katherine Beckett wrote the first book-length sociological explanation of the dramatic rise of imprisonment (Beckett, 1997). One of only a handful of scholars critically examining criminal justice reform trends today, Beckett continues to lead the scholarship on punishment and politics in the United States. Just as Making Crime Pay challenged the conventional wisdom that crime trends drove incarceration, Ending Mass Incarceration challenges criminal justice reform orthodoxies. This time, however, Beckett can marshal her and others’ research to focus appropriately on state policy and politics (rather than just national). A public sociologist from the start, Beckett also draws on her policy research and advocacy in Seattle, Washington. Written accessibly, Ending Mass Incarceration takes on one of the goals of this journal: to contribute to a “more informed level of public discourse and criticism in penal affairs” (Garland, 1999). It should be read by policymakers, reformers, and the concerned public as well as scholars and students.
The book questions two things we all “know” to be true: that in the last decade both the Right and Left supported reforms to reduce state incarceration and incarceration rates have declined. Beckett, however, argues that instead of focusing on the “modestly falling” aggregate incarceration rates in the US, we should examine trends in the ratio of the incarcerated population to the number of crimes. With this alternative measurement, the central paradox of the book appears: if “the need for change” in the US criminal legal system is “widely appreciated” and “significant reform is underway,” why has the “criminal legal response to crime continued to intensify after incarceration rates peaked in 2007? (11).” The first four chapters are organized around Beckett's answer to this question. Briefly put, she argues that the current reforms are not significant enough. Policymakers (of both political parties) continue to engage in a “politics of violence” that limits reforms to non-violent offenses (Chapter 2); rural and suburban prosecutors continue to use incarceration at high levels (Chapter 3); and drug offense reforms are limited to drug possession and expanding drug courts (Chapter 4).
The chapters draw on a variety of deceptively difficult empirical analyses of state legislation from all 50 states and county-level criminal legal system administrative data (coupled with crime data) from 38 states (see Appendix B). For example, because the US has no comprehensive source of state legislation easily accessible to social scientists, Beckett and her collaborators compiled lists of legislation kept by non-governmental agencies. Then, since a single piece of state legislation can include decarcerative and incarcerative legal changes, they had to read through each piece of legislation and separately code each provision. This type of research is vital for an accurate picture of state-level penal reform. They find that the vast majority of decarcerative reforms passed by state legislatures between 2007 and 2016 applied only to non-violent offenses and that most of the legislation focused on violence or public order offenses was incarcerative. Likewise, to examine whether admissions to state prison are shifting away from large urban areas, Beckett and her collaborators had to compile a national county-level dataset on crime, arrests, and prison admissions (again not easily accomplished with existing official data). Their decomposition analysis by county-type (urban, suburban, or rural) with data from 2011 to 2013 supports a new geography of imprisonment: the share of arrests that result in prison admission is twice as high in rural and suburban counties compared to urban counties (see also Simes, 2021).
The second half of the book focuses on solutions—policies that Beckett argues would actually reduce incarceration. In the spectrum of solutions offered by recent authors, the ideas in Ending Mass Incarceration stake a middle ground between mainstream technocratic reforms and prison abolition. They include 20-year maximum prison sentences and mandatory meaningful post-conviction review (Chapter 5) and use of restorative justice for violent offenses (Chapter 6). The solutions also challenge the wisdom of popular contemporary reforms, such as drug courts and police referral to drug abuse treatment (Chapter 7). The critique of the decarcerative potential of drug courts is particularly provocative as drug courts and treatment programs have become powerful penal actors (Murphy, 2015). Refreshingly, the ideas in Ending Mass Incarceration are anchored to a broader philosophy of punishment: a type of harm reduction plus, with the long-term goal of meaningful decarceration.
The book's theoretical interventions are not made explicit, yet the analyses and arguments in Ending Mass Incarceration contribute to debates over the catalysts for penal change. Beckett ascribes the stickiness of punitive penal policy to the “myth of monstrosity” which “assigns sole responsibility for violence to the allegedly unredeemable souls who commit interpersonal violence at one point in their lives” (37). Less acknowledged are the analyses in the book that demonstrate the role of political economy (see Chapter 3). Perhaps most instructive is Beckett's description of the development of LEAD, a program in Seattle that provides intensive case management and services to people “contending with extreme poverty and unmet behavioral health issues” (152). In the first iteration of LEAD, police officers referred people to the program whom they would have otherwise arrested. Over time referrals to LEAD were decoupled from arrests, demonstrating how policy can change local cultural norms, such as the “policibility” of homelessness and mental illness (Gascon and Roussell, 2019). However, LEAD sits precariously atop the urban growth machine. As key constituents, business owners eventually embraced LEAD as a better response to people they considered public nuisances. Yet the program is only sustainable if city leaders forgo profitable property development to provide housing for poor people. As such, we might conclude that policies that favor free-market capitalism and neglect extreme social disadvantage will constrain attempts to change penal culture.
