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The Insidious Momentum of American Mass Incarceration provides a comprehensive understanding of when, how, and why the United States became the world leader in incarceration to further propose a range of strategies that can reduce prison population and promote rational policies of criminal punishment. Zimring argues that the most powerful enemy to reducing excess incarceration are simply the mundane features of state and local government, such as elections of prosecutors and state support for prison budgets.
List of contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Part I. The Road to 2020
- Chapter 1. An American Surprise
- Chapter 2. Crime, Law Enforcement and Sentencing in an Era of Prison Expansion
- Chapter 3. Why the Prison-Boom Generation?
- Chapter 4. How American Institutions Encourage and Sustain High Rates of Imprisonment
- Chapter 5. What Happens Next?
- Part II. Strategies of Sentencing Reform
- Chapter 6. Two Categorical Alternatives to Prisons
- Chapter 7. Restructuring the Governance of Imprisonment
- Chapter 8. Prosecutorial Power and Adversarial Focus
- Part II-Afterword Explaining the Limited Estimates of Decarceration
- Part III. Policy Problems for a Million-Cell Future
- Chapter 9. Strategy and Tactics for Building Institutions
- Chapter 10. The Epidemic of Penal Disabilities
- Appendix A
- References
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Franklin E. Zimring is the William G. Simon Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or co-author of many books on topics including deterrence, the changing legal world of adolescence, capital punishment, the scale of imprisonment, and drug control. His books include American Juvenile Justice, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (voted a Book of the Year by the Economist), When Police Kill, and The City That Became Safe. He was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for 2020 (Philip J. Cook).
Summary
The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. While there is unanimous condemnation of the practice, there is no consensus on the causes nor any persuasive analysis of what is likely to happen in the coming decades.
In The Insidious Momentum of American Mass Incarceration, Franklin E. Zimring seeks a comprehensive understanding of when, how, and why the United States became the world leader in incarceration to further determine how the use of confinement can realistically be reduced. To do this, Zimring first profiles the growth of imprisonment after 1970, emphasizing the important roles of both the federal system and the distribution of power and fiscal responsibility among the levels of government in American states. He also examines the changes in law enforcement, prosecution and criminal sentencing that ignited the 400% increase in rates of imprisonment in the single generation after 1975. Finally, Zimring then proposes a range of strategies that can reduce prison population and promote rational policies of criminal punishment.
Arguing that the most powerful enemy to reducing excess incarceration is simply the mundane features of state and local government, such as elections of prosecutors and state support for prison budgets, this book challenges the convential ways we consider the issue of mass incarceration in the United States and how we can combat the rising numbers.
