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This article assesses whether the kinder, gentler rhetoric through which the disproportionately white opiate crisis has been framed has been accompanied by changes in drug sentencing policy and drug law enforcement that mirror this sympathetic discourse. Toward these ends, state-level drug sentencing policies enacted from 2010 to 2016 as well as recent trends in drug law enforcement and drug-related imprisonment are analyzed. The legislative findings show that policymakers are not singling out opiate violations for particularly lenient treatment. Instead, it is the user/dealer distinction that animates recent shifts in drug policy: While state lawmakers are re-thinking their approach to drug possession, they are more likely to have enhanced penalties for drug distribution than to have reduced them. In addition, although significant racial disparities in arrests and incarceration persist, the main change that has occurred is a decline in the black share of arrests and imprisonments. The discussion explores possible explanations for these unexpected findings, including the possibility that political dynamics help explain the decline of the drug war in many urban areas and, as a result, the diminution of racial disparities in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of the US carceral state has been accompanied by the emergence of what we call the ‘shadow carceral state’. Operating beyond the confines of criminal law and justice institutions, the shadow carceral state expands penal power through institutional annexation and legal hybridity, including: (1) increased civil and administrative pathways to incarceration; (2) the creation of civil ‘alternatives’ to invalidated criminal statutes; and (3) the incorporation of criminal law into administrative legal processes in ways that enhance state carceral power. Although legal doctrine deems civil and administration sanctions to be ‘not-punishment’, we call for a broad understanding of penal power and the carceral state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1990s, city officials made a concerted effort to enhance security and civility in two large cities long associated with fear and danger: New York City and Bogotá, Colombia. In this article, a comparison is made of how 'quality of life' and 'civility' were conceptualised and pursued in New York City and Bogotá in the 1990s. The findings suggest that there were some similarities in the conceptualisation and operationalisation of these ideals, and that both cities became markedly safer in the period under investigation. Yet there were also important differences in the quality of life campaigns undertaken in the two settings. Specifically, measures to protect rights, enhance social services and expand the use of public spaces, particularly in poor communities, were a key component of Bogotá's quality of life campaign. The Bogotá example shows that it is possible to take crime and civility seriously without criminalising minor offences and by coupling security measures with broader initiatives to strengthen democratic inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, municipal governments across the United States have adopted novel social control techniques including off-limits orders, parks exclusion laws, and other applications of trespass law. These new tools are used to exclude the socially marginal from contested public spaces. These new social control techniques fuse criminal and civil legal authority and are touted as `alternatives' to arrest and incarceration. Ironically, these new techniques nonetheless increase the number of behaviors and people defined as criminal and subject to formal social control. This article describes these legal innovations and considers their origins and theoretical implications. We argue that recognition of law's constitutive effects helps to explain the origins and nature of the urban social control innovations described here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid growth of the US penal population over the last two decades has coincided with a decline in the number of welfare recipients. While shifts in crime rates, economic and political considerations most commonly account for variations in incarceration, we place the rise in incarceration levels in the institutional context of welfare state retrenchment. An analysis of state-level incarceration rates between 1975 and 1995 indicates that large penal systems are found in states with weak welfare systems. The negative relationship between welfare and incarceration grows over time, suggesting the emergence of a novel kind of penal-welfare regime in the late 1980s and 1990s. Although welfare state retrenchment is often interpreted as a kind of market deregulation, our analysis suggests that declining support for social welfare is part of a punitive policy development in which the state has a substantial and active role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]