Dismantling the Carceral State: The Future of Penal Policy Reform

The way prisons are run and their inmates are treated gives a faithful picture of a society, especially of the ideas and methods of those who dominate that society. Prisons indicate the distance to which government and social conscience have come in their concern and respect for the human being.1 Over the past three decades, the United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in U.S. history. Three features distinguish the U.S. carceral state: the sheer size of its prison and jail population; its reliance on harsh, degrading sanctions; and the persistence and centrality of the death penalty. Nearly one in fifty people in the United States, excluding children and the elderly, is behind bars today.2 In a period dominated by calls to roll back the state in all areas of social and economic policy, we have witnessed a massive expansion of the state in the realm of penal policy. The U.S. incarceration rate has accelerated dramatically, increasing more than five-fold between 1971 and 2000.3 Today a higher proportion of the adult population in the United States is behind bars than anywhere else in the world.4 The United States, with five percent of the world's population, has nearly one quarter of its prisoners.5 America's incarceration rate of 714 prisoners per 100,000 people is five to twelve times the rate of other industrialized nations.6 The reach of the U.S. penal state extends far beyond the 2.2 million men and women who are now serving time in prison or jail in the United States. On any given day, nearly 7 million people are under the supervision of the correctional system, including jail, prison, parole, probation, and other community supervision sanctions.7 This constitutes 3.2% of the U.S. adult population, or one in every thirty-two adults, a rate of state supervision that is unprecedented in U.S. history.8 If one adds up the total number of prisoners, parolees, probationers, employees of correctional institutions, close relatives of prisoners and correctional employees, and residents in communities where jails and prisons are major employers, tens of millions of people are directly affected each day by the carceral state.9 These overall figures on incarceration belie the enormous and disproportionate impact that this bold and unprecedented social experiment has had on certain groups in U.S. society, especially young African Americans, Hispanics, and the growing number of incarcerated women who are parents of young children.10 Blacks, who make up less than thirteen percent of the U.S. population, now comprise nearly half of all people in prison,11 up from a quarter in the late 1930s.12 The number of black men in prison or jail has grown so rapidly over the past quarter century that today more black men are behind bars than enrolled in colleges and universities.13 Unlike other major state-building exercises like the New Deal and the Great Society, the construction of the carceral state was not presented as a package of policies for public debate. The carceral state was built up rapidly over the past thirty years, largely outside of the public eye, and not necessarily according to a common plan. Its construction has been an almost invisible feature of American political development, not a contested site of American politics. While the explosion in the size of the prison population and the retributive turn in U.S. penal policy are well documented,14 the underlying political causes of this massive expansion and what might reverse it are not well understood. This Article focuses on the political prospects for dismantling the carceral state, in particular the potential building blocks for a successful coalition.15 As a preface to any discussion of public policy reform, we should not just assume that reform means progressive movement toward some social, economic, or political outcome that is widely recognized as necessary and desirable. American history is riddled with examples of much heralded reforms in social policy that have had negative, unanticipated consequences. …

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