Researching Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolition

Ending Mass Incarceration: Why It Persists and How To Achieve Meaningful Reform by Katherine Beckett Critics on both the left and the right increasingly use the term “mass incarceration” to call attention to the unprecedented scale of, and racial inequities in, the U.S. criminal legal system—and the havoc they wreak. This book shows that the criminal legal response to lawbreaking has continued to intensify even as lawmakers increasingly embrace criminal justice reform. It also identifies three dynamics that help explain why mass incarceration persists despite plummeting crime rates and widespread efforts to reduce prison populations. These incarcerative forces include the political and cultural dynamics surrounding the issue of violence, resistance to criminal legal system reform in suburban and especially rural counties, and the failure of the most popular drug policy reforms (including drug courts) to meaningfully reduce the reach of the criminal legal system or racial inequities in it. The second part of the book identifies three broad political and policy shifts that would significantly reduce the scale of punishment while also addressing the social problems to which it is a (misguided) response. These include the enactment of a twenty-year maximum sentence and the expansion of restorative justice principles and practices that offer alternative ways of promoting accountability and healing. Meaningful harm-reduction-based drug policy reforms, including the expansion of alternative responses to low-level crime and disorder that operate outside the criminal legal system, enhanced access to medication-assisted treatment, and investment in low-income housing, including Housing First initiatives, are also needed.

Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration and a Road To Repair by Danielle Sered In a book Democracy Now! calls a “complete overhaul of the way we’ve been taught to think about crime, punishment, and justice,” Danielle Sered, the executive director of Common Justice and renowned expert on violence, offers pragmatic solutions that take the place of prison, meeting the needs of survivors and creating pathways for people who have committed violence to repair harm. Critically, Sered argues that reckoning is owed not only on the part of individuals who have caused violence, but also by our nation for its overreliance on incarceration to produce safety—at a great cost to communities, survivors, racial equity, and the very fabric of our democracy.

Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How To Achieve Real Reform by John Pfaff In Locked In, John Pfaff argues that the factors most commonly cited to explain mass incarceration -- the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons -- tell us much less than we think. Instead, Pfaff urges us to look at other factors, especially a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before.