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Forty-year anniversaries are sometimes celebrated with a “Ruby Jubilee.”1 In modifying the title of Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini’s The Prison and the Factory for a 21st-century audience, one can accept for clarity’s sake 40th Anniversary Edition in favor of Ruby Jubilee Edition (though it does have nice ring). In the 40 years since original publication, an historical development we now call “Mass Incarceration” materialized, hardly a matter for celebration, but as a tragic milestone the book’s latest edition serves to commemorate.

Quantitative researchers increasingly draw on ethnographic research that may not be generalizable to inform and interpret results from statistical analyses; at the same time, while generalizability is not always an ethnographic research goal, the integration of quantitative data by ethnographic researchers to buttress findings on processes and mechanisms has also become common. Despite the burgeoning use of dual designs in research, there has been little empirical assessment of whether the themes, narratives, and ideal types derived from qualitative fieldwork are broadly generalizable in a manner consistent with estimates obtained from quantitative analyses. We draw on simulated and real-world data to assess the bias associated with failing to align samples across qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Our findings demonstrate that significant bias exists in mixed-methods studies when sampling is incongruent within research designs. We propose three solutions to limit bias in mixed-methods research.

Amid ongoing controversies in ethnography concerning representation, reproducibility, and generalizability, social scientific scholarship has increasingly taken a mixed-methods turn. While studies that blend qualitative and quantitative data promise to enhance the validity of representations of social worlds under analysis, they cannot escape contending with foundational dilemmas of scientific translation, integration, and commensurability across methodological paradigms. Recent debates have ignited a new line of inquiry about the integration of multiple methods in ethnography. In this paper, we argue that “cameo appearances”—the summoning of either qualitative or quantitative analyses in separate, purely mono-method studies—amounts to a form of methodological tokenism under the guise of methodological pluralism. We articulate sampling design, enhanced training, and curriculum development as crucial for arbitrating these debates as mixed-methods research emerges as a distinct innovation in twenty-first-century ethnography.

This essay reviews trends since the early 1980s in the number of inmates confined in American prisons as well as possible factors contributing to the massive increase in prison admissions (ranging from highly functionalist structural accounts to more culturally embedded midrange ones). Defining features of the late twentieth century imprisonment boom are discussed, encompassing global notoriety; persistent racial disparities; the role of felony drug filings, convictions and sentences in fueling both the scale and racial disparities of imprisonment; and regional and jurisdictional variations in trends across three planes: federal-state, interstate, and intrastate. Finally, the recent “stabilization” of incarceration rates in the United States is described and possible implications considered.

Mass incarceration is commonly understood as a sweeping national policy development, which has obscured remarkable local variation at the policy implementation stage. California’s “Realignment” (Assembly Bill [AB] 109; 2011) is a reform that exploits this variation by design. Research consistently finds that, net of crime, demographic, political, and system capacity characteristics explain the variation in incarceration across local jurisdictions. Do these characteristics also explain decarceration? This study uses group-based trajectory modeling and logistic regression to examine the association of such characteristics with California county trajectories of state prison use in the decade preceding Realignment. County imprisonment trajectories and their related characteristics are then assessed as explanations for decarceration under AB 109. Distinct “risk” factors for high and/or increasing imprisonment trajectories are identified, as well as apparent protective factors. A clear association was found between previous trajectories and decarceration, but county-level characteristics did not demonstrate the predicted effects. Results indicate that decarceration cannot be explained as merely the mirror image of incarceration and should be examined as a distinct phenomenon. Implications for future research and policymaking are discussed.