Mass Incarceration and Its Discontents

The contours of mass incarceration are, by now, broadly familiar. The U.S. incarceration rate began an unprecedented ascent in the 1970s. This trend continued through 2007, when 760 of every 100,000 U.S. residents— nearly 1 in 100 adults—lived behind bars, five million others were on probation or parole, more than ten million were booked into jail, and nearly one in three U.S. residents had a criminal record (Kaeble and Glaze 2016, Table 4; PEW Center on the States 2008; Sabol 2014; Subramanian et al. 2016). The scale of confinement now sharply differentiates the United States from comparable countries, where incarceration rates range from a low of 45 per 100,000 residents in Japan to 145 in England and Wales (Walmsley 2015). By 2015, the U.S. incarceration rate had fallen to 670 per 100,000 residents, a drop of nearly 12 percent (Kaeble and Glaze 2016). Still, the United States remains the world’s leading jailer (Wagner and Walsh 2016). The emergence of mass incarceration in the United States has spawned a tremendous amount of social scientific research. A number of studies analyze its proximate causes and show that shifts in policy and practice (rather than rising crime rates) were the primary driver of penal expansion. Other studies analyze the consequences of mass incarceration, documenting, for example, its disparate and adverse impact on people, families, and communities of color. Some assess how penal expansion affects not only the incarcerated, but also those who are stopped, frisked, arrested, fined, and surveilled—even in the absence of incarceration or conviction. And a substantial body of research shows that penal expansion has had far-reaching sociological effects that tend to enhance—and mask—racial and socio-economic inequalities. Although the decline in incarceration since 2007 has been modest, it has nonetheless triggered much discussion regarding the need for, and prospects of, reform. Yet researchers are debating more than the likelihood that meaningful change will occur; they also offer competing understandings of the problems that require attention and the solutions that should be enacted. The books reviewed here—Hard Bargains: The Coercive Power of Drug Laws in Federal Court, by Mona Lynch; Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, by John F. Pfaff; and Sentencing Fragments: Penal Reform in America, 1975–2025, by Michael Tonry—speak to these pressing questions and offer surprisingly different ideas about what needs to be done to reverse mass Hard Bargains: The Coercive Power of Drug Laws in Federal Court, by Mona Lynch. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2016. 206 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780871545114.