Race, Inequality, and the Prioritization of Corrections Spending in the American States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Observers of U.S. criminal justice trends have noted the vast increase in spending on prison systems over the past 25 years. First, the authors empirically verify that overall spending on corrections not only increased but also that corrections spending grew compared to other budget areas. Second, the authors examine the mechanisms behind this prioritization. The authors posit that race and class dynamics of individual states affects the extent to which corrections spending is prioritized. Race acts as a central cleavage factor while class acts as a secondary cleavage in the political decision-making environment. Time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) analysis of state budget outlays between 1984 and 1999 provides strong evidence for this hypothesis. Our findings depart from previous scholarly work devoted to “underclass” theories of race and class interactions; the authors uncover a more intricate relationship between race and class. The article demonstrates that the higher the proportion of African Americans in a state, the higher the prioritization of corrections spending. Only in states with low proportions of African Americans does income inequality matter.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".