Why are so many Americans in prison? / Steven Raphael and Michael A. Stoll.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Between 1975 and 2007, the American incarceration rate increased nearly fivefold, a historic increase that puts the United States in a league of its own among advanced economies. We incarcerate more people today than we ever have, and we stand out as the nation that most frequently uses incarceration to punish those who break the law. What factors explain the dramatic rise in incarceration rates in such a short period of time? In Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Steven Raphael and Michael A. Stoll analyze the shocking expansion of America's prison system and illustrate the pressing need to rethink mass incarceration in this country. Raphael and Stoll carefully evaluate changes in crime patterns, enforcement practices and sentencing laws to reach a sobering conclusion: So many Americans are in prison today because we have chosen, through our public policies, to put them there. They dispel the notion that a rise in crime rates fueled the incarceration surge; in fact, crime rates have steadily declined to all-time lows. There is also little evidence for other factors commonly offered to explain the prison boom, such as the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill since the 1950s, changing demographics, or the crack-cocaine epidemic. By contrast, Raphael and Stoll demonstrate that legislative changes to a relatively small set of sentencing policies explain nearly all prison growth since the 1980s. So-called tough on crime laws, including mandatory minimum penalties and repeat offender statutes, have increased the propensity to punish more offenders with lengthier prison sentences. Raphael and Stoll argue that the high-incarceration regime has inflicted broad social costs, particularly among minority communities, who form a disproportionate share of the incarcerated population. Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? ends with a powerful plea to consider alternative crime control strategies, such as expanded policing, drug court programs, and sentencing law reform, which together can end our addiction to incarceration and still preserve public safety. As states confront the budgetary and social costs of the incarceration boom, Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? provides a revealing and accessible guide to the policies that created the era of mass incarceration and what we can do now to end it.

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CHOICE Review

Federal and state research agencies publish valuable data sets dealing with crime, corrections, and related matters. Reports from the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI are especially important. But it is left to independent analysts to make sense of the data. Here, two professors of public policy, Raphael (Berkeley) and Stoll (UCLA), analyze crime and correctional statistics in important and original ways. Significances of their many conclusions are bound to affect thinking on why the US has embraced incarceration so avidly. Policy changes enacted into legislation created the burgeoning system now in place. Curiously, the incarceration boom grew only indirectly as a result of increased crime trends. Whatever the effectiveness of incarceration is--and the authors find it of dubious value when analyzed scientifically--it declines with increased bodies behind bars. Raphael and Stoll use statistical analyses to examine issues like the nexus between prison and drug crimes and deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. One conclusion based on data analyzed from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation: diversion of low-level property crime and drug offenders from prisons to the community would not increase crime significantly. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty/practitioners. R. D. McCrie John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY