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We are extremely pleased to have been invited to take part in this “trialogue.” First, we appreciate the opportunity to situate our own book in a broader conversation with two excellent scholars whose work we have long admired. More significantly, however, we hope that this exchange highlights a rapidly growing body of work by political scientists on the important topic of crime and punishment.
The two books we review here, Marie Gottschalk’s Caught and Naomi Murakawa’s The First Civil Right, are important not just as individual works but because they showcase the many ways in which the theories and tools of political science enable us to extend, alter, and complicate the study of crime control in America. In this review, we point to the key ways in which these books not only provide new evidence on crime and punishment but also begin to apply a set of different frameworks—employing tools of the trade in political science—to these important subjects of inquiry. We conclude by posing a number of additional questions these books raise and laying out an agenda for the continued growth of work on criminal justice and governance in America.
The Political Science Puzzles of Crime and Punishment
These two books provide distinctly different entrees into the politics of mass incarceration. Murakawa’s is a detailed political history, tracing racial framings of the crime problem in federal policymaking since the 1940s. Gottschalk’s study is a broad assessment of the state of imprisonment today, offering a thorough and pointed critique of the notion that fiscal pressures on state budgets will necessarily usher in the beginning of the end of the carceral era. Yet these books both provide sweeping and magisterial accounts of the political forces—the frames, interests, actors, and institutions—that propelled the rise of incarceration in the United States.
Most are at least passingly familiar with the dramatic rise of incarceration in this country, and its disproportionate impact on racial minorities and the poor. The political dimensions of these developments, perhaps more than any other, involve a set of theoretical puzzles. Why, amidst a liberal tradition and trenchant “dread of government,” was the vast and expensive carceral state so enthusiastically constructed? How did the carceral state become so deeply entrenched that—even as crime rates began to decline, as the drug epidemic ebbed, and as state budgets became increasingly strapped—incarceration rates continued to rise? How, in an era when the nation had at last partially dismantled state-sanctioned race control, was a system of racial inequality so quickly and enthusiastically built? And why, at key moments during its rise, was there so little opposition to the tremendous development and maintenance of mass incarceration, even and especially by those most affected? Taken together, Gottschalk and Murakawa offer three lines of insight into these important questions.
1. In These Accounts, the Political Development of the Carceral State Provides a Stark Lesson in the Ways That Policy Proposals Can Fail to Engender a Coherent and Organized Opposition
The singularly ambitious contribution of The First Civil Right is that it meticulously documents the important role that the liberal “law and order” ideology played in constructing the foundations on which the carceral state was built. Murakawa’s account shows us that too often, popular and scholarly accounts of the postwar rise of criminal justice have focused on the strategic policy framings, goals, and interests of conservative elites and racially resentful whites during the 1960s. Murakawa reminds us that liberals, too, were strategic actors in this period; in ignoring the political Left, we have missed “liberal racial criminalization that thrived in the full light of day” (p. 8).
Liberal framings of the issue made several perilous moves that, Murakawa argues, amounted to ceding broader attacks on the system of racial injustice, opening the way for sizable state building in the carceral domain, and reinforcing a punitive policy direction. The liberal strategy of seeking a more predictable and race-neutral criminal justice system—a “proceduralist, rights-based state” that was “purged of discrimination”—eschewed broader justice claims. Importantly, because the new system they envisioned was based on the quality of procedures and administrative modernization, however well intentioned, it was bereft of a full-throated critique of the racial order and ended up obscuring “racial power.” By legitimizing federal intervention, constructing a new criminal code, and increasing funding to police, this strategy wound up building the very system of “lawful racial violence” that would confine blacks in the post-civil rights era. Worse, by “correcting” racism in the system, liberals ended up naturalizing the remaining racial disparities as attributable to black criminality.
Just as crucial was that liberals framed the issue of black violence and lawlessness as being psychological in nature, an automatic and natural outgrowth of white racial animus. Here, Murakawa’s account follows Khalil Muhammad’s brilliant analysis of the intellectual currency of “black crime” through the early part of the twentieth century in The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2010). However, more than Muhammad, Murakawa blames liberals for their part, rather than examining (as Muhammad does) the social, political, and cultural contexts that led them to reaffirm “notions of black criminality” (p. 13). The question her analysis leaves at bay is why American political elites, intellectuals, and reformers so frequently respond to violence and other social ills through punitive state building rather than market-based alternatives or expanded safety nets that would deal with vulnerability in all its forms. As Lisa Miller pushes us to see, insecurity from predatory violence and insecurity from state punishment are two sides of the same coin of “state failure.” (“Violence and the Racialized Failure of the American State,” 2014). And works by Jonathan Simon (Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, 2007) and Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram (Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race, 2011) make clear that the logics of crime control are inextricably tied to the logics that motivate welfare and other social programs.
Gottschalk’s telling gives us a distinct lens on this issue, pointing out that the building of the carceral state was fundamentally a project based on “maximum control at minimum cost with little outside oversight” (Caught, p. 56). This is an incredible, wide-ranging book, and it leaves no stone unturned in its account of what has not just led to but also sustained punitive politics in the United States. In Gottschalk’s account, the absence of opposition was driven in part by the development of zones outside democratic accountability and by the growth of economic dependence on the carceral state by strong interest groups. Gottschalk argues that prison practices evolved outside of public awareness not only because costs were hidden from the voting public but also because prison conditions were given little oversight, monitoring, and regulation and the Department of Justice (DOJ) was reluctant to interfere. (As she notes on p. 39, “independent oversight of U.S. prisons and jails is minimal or nonexistent compared to other Western countries.”)
2. The Narratives Offered by Each of These Books Trace the Processes by Which Race is Continually Constructed (and Reshaped) by Political Actors and Institutions
Both works give refreshingly new accounts of the role of race in the expansion of punishment. Gottschalk, in particular, departs from the existing narratives that identify the war on drugs, and its racial targeting, as the main engine of carceral buildup. For Gottschalk, the problem is cast in contemporary terms: First, the focus on racial aspects of incarceration has edged out other important dimensions of the issue; second, the carceral state is distinctive not just because of its huge racial disparities but because it locks everyone up at higher rates than other nations and in prisons that are comparatively less humane; and finally, by focusing exclusively on the black/white disparity, we miss the important effects that the carceral state has had for immigrants, poor whites, and women. Most importantly, though, race is not the grounds on which to mount sustained penal reform movements: “an emphasis on racial egalitarianism in penal policy does not necessarily result in a fairer, less punitive carceral state” (Caught, p. 135).
Gottschalk reminds us that “it is a sobering fact that if all drug cases were eliminated, the U.S. imprisonment rate would still have quadrupled over the past thirty-five years” (p. 128). Indeed, a central and welcome contribution of this book is its detailed documenting of a host of institutional (and institutionalized) interests in criminal justice, and the wide array of economic and political issues that do not centrally concern racial disproportionality. Yet while her attention to issues outside of race is surely welcome, does she ultimately wind up understating its centrality, ignoring how deep the roots of race run throughout political dialogues about crime and punishment in America today? A reader could plausibly conclude from Gottschalk’s account that race is only incidental to either the buildup or maintenance of mass imprisonment. However, it seems difficult to separate even the seemingly race-neutral dimensions of the carceral state from the racial biases that underlay it. Here, we agree with Claire Kim’s understanding of racial power: “The genius of racial power … is that it does not require intentionality on anyone’s part to reproduce itself” (Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City, 2003, p. 158).
Murakawa picks up on these themes, providing a historical analysis and distinct lens. For Murakawa, it was the singular drive to rid the system of bias that, paradoxically, ended up leading in a more punitive direction. “Race liberals” focused on procedural improvements and ending the “corrosive effect of individual prejudice” within criminal justice, while largely conceding and naturalizing its structural dimensions. Again, this particular angle provides a novel and intriguing perspective on a familiar set of issues. Readers will surely see how liberals shaped, complicated, reinforced, and even were co-opted by the conservative logics of crime control. But does Murakawa overstate the claim that it was liberals who “built the prison state”? Failing to respond appropriately to something before it occurs does not equate, as she would have it, to “building,” “constructing,” “accelerating,” or “propelling” the carceral state, all active verbs used throughout The First Civil Right.
In hindsight, we can all agree that the procedural, “color-blind,” race-neutral reforms brought about by racial liberalism had great costs; they often, as Lani Guinier has argued, brought “formal equality and nothing more” (“From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma,” 2006). However, we must be careful of present-ism in laying blame at the doorsteps of racial liberals—imputing knowledge to actors from the higher ground of the present. We know now what these decisions wrought. But what action was available to Harry Truman and others? As Ira Katznelson has written about Franklin Roosevelt’s Faustian bargain not to undermine Jim Crow while delivering to the nation the modern welfare state: “It makes no sense to write a retrospective morality tale condemning politicians and citizens who were imprisoned by Jim Crow. We should not imagine a freedom of action they did not have” (When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, 2005, p. 29). Murakawa's reader frequently feels that she is being asked to blame Truman for the carceral state because he sought to punish lawless whites for lynchings, or civil rights leaders because they advocated for color-blind institutions, or the Johnson administration because it urged the professionalization of police forces. Murakawa seems at points to suggest that nothing short of fully dismantling “global capitalism,” “colonialism,” and “structural racism” would have been enough.
3. These Retellings of the Rise of the Carceral State Help Illuminate the Wide Variety of Ways That Policies Can Become Self-Reinforcing
Both of these accounts point to the path dependence of policy design; public policies create interests, institutions, and ways of understanding the nature and solution to a problem that more deeply entrench those policies, and help foreclose alternative solutions that might have been possible at an earlier period. In Gottschalk, we see that although the carceral state may have been built initially by political interests, economic actors and interests were quick to follow. State and local governments rapidly became accustomed to, and even dependent on, federal grants and funds from asset forfeitures. Private companies sprang up to handle lending (frequently at very high rates of return) for posting bail and covering other legal financial obligations and fees. Corporations were formed that initiated lucrative contracts for monitoring parolees and probationers, building and staffing private prisons, and handling a host of other tasks connected to prison, parole, and probation services.
At the same time, those who might logically be most opposed to the unceasing trend toward wider and harsher punishment—the communities that are most directly impacted by these moves—were systematically disempowered, disenfranchised, and ignored. Gottschalk argues, as we do in our own work, that “the government’s penal, welfare, social service, surveillance, governing, economic, and political functions have become deeply entangled in ways that are creating troubling gradations of citizenship and belonging” (Caught, p. 13).
More broadly, the historical accounts provided by Gottschalk and Murakawa help illustrate that the forces that grew the prison state are distinct from those that sustain it. In Murakawa’s account, we are urged to see how the defining of a problem in particular ways can have a lasting legacy decades later. She concludes that “liberal problem framings and policy solutions shaped, complicated, and ultimately accelerated carceral state development” (First Civil Right, p. 13). At key moments, crime “opens up political space” to frame agendas and solutions, highlighting the importance of problem definition and framing in constraining policy choices. As has been noted elsewhere, policies are constructed through a political sequence “in which institutional development renders some interpretations of problems more persuasive and makes some prospective policies more politically viable than others” (Margaret Weir, “Ideas and the Politics of Bounded Innovation,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, 1992). Essentially, the structuring of a given problem in a particular way can lead to one set of solutions that precludes alternative policy options.
As the logic of imprisonment took hold, institutions and agencies asserted their interests and gained substantial power in political and policy debates. State Departments of Corrections became very “powerful, independent political actors in their own right” (Caught, p. 50). Correctional officers unions used their considerable leverage to lobby for labor protections, and California and several other states also became independent political actors that threw their weight behind favored politicians and punitive policies. Private interests likewise engaged in the political process, lobbying policymakers for continued access to the stream of revenue that mass incarceration had wrought.
Factors Helping Us Understand the Future of the Carceral State
These three lines of insight from Caught and The First Civil Right should leave us with a fair bit of pessimism about whether we will witness the end of the prison boom any time soon. Certainly, both authors are wary that the political movement to assert law and order that has dominated the modern era leaves room for any real discussion about the structural causes of crime. Instead, they suggest that the legacy of imprisonment politics has left us with a self-reinforcing system whose logic is driven by the pursuit of administrative efficiency and the fiscal imperative. As Gottschalk cautions, economic constraints alone do not mean the end is in sight. The economic interests of private actors—who now constitute major players in nearly every stage of the criminal justice pipeline—will not be so easily disentangled from current modes of detaining, adjudicating, and punishing. Rather, the result of recent state budgetary crises may instead be “leaner and meaner prisons,” with little in the way of true reform.
Nor will heightened discussion of racial disparities, reflected in the widespread attention to the work of Michelle Alexander and bolstered by the recent killings of black men by police, inexorably lead to substantive change (Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 2012). Here, we can learn from Murakawa’s history, which makes clear that sensitivity to the racial dimensions of crime and crime control can come in many forms, and even well-meaning advocates for minority communities can be misguided in their approach. Early civil rights strategies that criminalized racial discrimination foreclosed later strategies. A focus solely on incarceration’s racial dimensions evades discussion of the many other underlying structural and institutional mechanisms that advance incarceration and its attendant disparities. But it is not only that problem definitions preclude some alternatives. In addition, deeply rooted norms can constrain future policy possibilities even when the logics that originally undergirded the favored policy option are no longer consistent with modern understandings and context. For instance, Murakawa’s emphasis on the building up of procedural legitimacy shows how this liberal move ultimately rendered invisible how awesome state violence was (“the carceral state was permitted limitless violence so long as it conformed to clearly defined laws, administrative protocol, and due process.” First Civil Right, p. 43).
Moreover, as Gottschalk so ably points out, reducing racial disproportionality and diminishing correctional budgets not only may do little to advance the cause of smaller prison populations overall, but also may have unintended effects. If we continue to pursue racial disproportionality and fiscal imperatives as our primary guiding logics, we run the risk of welcoming in an era of less humane prisons, as correctional institutions pursue a “race to the bottom.” What is needed, according to these accounts, is a wholescale reframing of incarceration to focus not on racial disproportionality but, rather, on the grounds of fundamental decency and in terms of human rights.
Factors Helping Us Understand Key Aspects of the Political Enterprise
In each of these ways, these two books expand our understanding of the politics of crime and punishment, but also make evident that crime and punishment are both reflective of and central to the American political process. Both Gottschalk and Murakawa help answer questions that are specific to crime and punishment, but also make clear that understanding the specific politics of criminal justice can help cast into stark relief a variety of important aspects of American politics and governance. We hope that these books, as well as this special issue of Perspectives on Politics and the nascent proliferation of work from scholars whose general concern is with the contours of the political process, will entice others to engage with these important lines of inquiry.
They will have their work cut out for them, as there are many questions that remain unanswered by these works, which political scientists are uniquely situated to pursue. Scholars might fruitfully pick up on the host of questions that these works leave open: What has been the role of black organizations and political agency among communities of color? How is race both made salient and also obscured by racial liberalism? What “windows of opportunity” are provided by high-profile events, such as the recent killings in Ferguson, New York, and elsewhere? What types of political organization and political capital will be required to bring about change in current policy? We look forward to the continued resurgence of interest in criminal justice among political scientists that will advance understanding on these and other critical questions of crime, punishment, and democracy in America.
