Money and mass incarceration: The bad, the mad, and penal reform*

Spelman’s (2009, this issue) analysis calls into question the popular contention among many antiprison activists and other penal reformers that the U.S. prison boom is bound to end soon because states just cannot afford it anymore. States have had extremely deep pockets to build more prisons even in hard times, and the availability of state revenues to pay for more prison beds has been a leading engine for prison growth. States spent more money on prisons between 1977 and 2005, but they also spent more on lots of other items, such as education and health care. Leaving aside the current financial crisis, the United States has had three major economic downturns since the early 1980s. These downturns made no dent whatsoever in the nation’s incarceration rate, which continued to increase steeply through good times and bad. Spelman’s analysis implies that it would take a truly enormous economic contraction that drastically hit state spending across the board to cause the nation’s extraordinarily high incarceration rate to plateau or turn downward. For anyone troubled by mass incarceration in the United States, this analysis looks like a dismal picture of what, if anything, can be done to reverse the prison boom, except perhaps to pray for a wrenching and protracted economic contraction. But an alternative policy prescription embedded in Spelman’s (2009) analysis is far less fatalistic. In addition to ample funds to pay for more cells, Spelman identifies two other factors as key in explaining why the U.S. prison population has been escalating for more than 35 years with no end in sight: an increasing crime rate and tougher sentencing policies. He casts doubt on alternative explanations that attribute the U.S. prison boom primarily to underlying social and economic conditions, like poverty, unemployment, failing schools and failing families (as measured by highschool dropout rates and out-of-wedlock births), income inequality, and