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This article examines the origins of US mass incarceration. Although it is clear that changes in policy and practice are the proximate drivers of the prison boom, researchers continue to explore—and disagree about—why crime control policy and practice changed in ways that fueled the growth of incarceration in all 50 states. One well-known account emphasizes the centrality of racial and electoral politics. This article more fully explicates the racial politics perspective, describes several friendly amendments to it, and explores a range of arguments that challenge it in more fundamental ways. In the end, we maintain that although mass incarceration has many drivers, it cannot be explained without reference to the centrality of racial politics; the importance of the crime issue to the GOP electoral strategy that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement; and the nature of the decentralized, two-party electoral system in the United States.

This study analyzes prison admission and crime data to assess whether the penal system’s response to crime has continued to intensify since mass incarceration’s peak and whether the increasing use of prison in nonurban areas helps explain this trend. The findings show that penal intensity has continued to escalate despite falling crime rates and widespread efforts to reduce prison populations. Further, the justice system’s response to crime is most vigorous in nonurban, and especially rural, counties, where more felony arrests for all types of offenses result in a prison sentence. Although not new, this geographic difference has grown in recent years. While penal intensity thus varies notably within states, case outcomes also vary markedly across states. Comparative case studies of dynamics in a highly punitive state (Kentucky) and a less punitive state (Washington) show how formal law interacts with local dynamics not only by creating “statutory hammers” that are utilized by zealous prosecutors and judges but also by limiting the impact of aggressive prosecutorial practices on prison sentences.

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.

The drug war has failed and must end. The question is: How—and what should replace it? Ideally, an improved response to injurious forms of drug use would reduce the harm caused by criminal legal system involvement, the suffering that stems from unmanaged addiction, the harm that flows from illicit and unregulated drug markets, and racial inequities in all of these sources of harm. This chapter identifies several shifts in drug policy that achieve these goals and are feasible in the near to medium term. These include the radical expansion of alternative responses to substance use disorder and low-level crime based on harm-reduction principles and dramatically increased investment in medication-assisted treatment programs and in low-income housing, including Housing First models. If brought to scale, these changes would reduce drug-related suffering, the harm associated with the illicit drug market, the misery caused by the involvement of the criminal legal system in the lives of people who use illicit substances, and racial inequities in these forms of suffering.

The continued use of prisons and jails at historically high levels in rural and suburban areas is sustaining mass incarceration. Although urban counties have far higher crime rates, criminal legal authorities in suburban and rural counties send a much greater share of the people who are arrested on felony charges to prison. Counties with higher levels of social disadvantage, more conservative electorates, and larger Black populations have higher prison admission rates after controlling for crime-related problems. Even after taking all of these factors into account, however, rural and suburban counties have comparatively high prison admission rates. If rural and suburban counties matched urban counties in terms of their use of prison, prison admissions would be reduced by roughly one-third. While geographic variation in the propensity to punish increasingly falls along urban/nonurban lines, it is made possible by the existence of tough sentencing laws that enable zealous prosecutors and judges to impose severe penalties.

Chapter 1 explains why mass incarceration has failed to improve public safety and makes the case for expanding our understanding of public safety and how it can be achieved. The chapter also shows that the criminal legal system response to lawbreaking has continued to intensify in recent years even as many states have enacted reforms aimed at reducing prison populations and incarceration rates have declined modestly. And although the policies and practices that have fueled the expansion of the justice system are routinely justified as crime-fighting measures, research shows that mass incarceration is a short-sighted, ineffective, costly, inhumane, and overly narrow approach to public safety. The remainder of the chapter provides an overview of the book. Part I explores three underrecognized dynamics that are working to bolster mass incarceration. Part II identifies three broad policy and political changes that would notably reduce the scale and power of the criminal legal system and racial inequities in it while also addressing the social problems to which it is a failed response.

Existing criminal justice and sentencing policies do not serve survivors of violence well, particularly those who are of color and from disadvantaged communities. Policies that allow for the imposition of long and life sentences are often said to reflect victims’ preferences, but this is misleading. Long prison sentences also consume significant public dollars that could be reallocated to improve victim services and enhance crime prevention efforts. Increased investment in restorative justice alternatives would also provide a more effective, humane, and racially equitable way of responding to the problem of violence. While important questions about scalability remain unresolved, developing the institutional capacity to operate restorative justice-inspired interventions that target violence and survivors of color is an important component of the effort to ameliorate the harm associated with both violence and mass incarceration.

This chapter shows that the issue of violence poses political and cultural challenges that are a significant obstacle to criminal legal reform. These challenges are even more difficult to surmount than the opposition of vested interests that often work to block reform. Virtually all states have adopted at least some decarcerative reforms (often against the opposition of interest groups such as prison guard unions or prosecutor associations). However, most of the reforms that have been enacted pertain only to nonviolent crimes. The reluctance of lawmakers to end excessive sentences for more serious crimes reflects deeply rooted and widely shared images of people who have committed an act of violence at one point in their lives as monstrous and irredeemable others. The second section of this chapter critiques this myth of monstrosity, which is deeply rooted in racist tropes and stereotypes, and is in tension with a substantial body of social scientific evidence.

The ascendance of a narrow definition of public safety that recognizes just one threat to public safety, the risk of interpersonal violence, was the result of an eminently useful political strategy employed by conservative (and, increasingly, liberal) political actors in recent decades. Yet the institutional expression of this political strategy—mass incarceration—has been a colossal policy failure. Mass incarceration does not make us safer. In fact, by consuming scarce public resources, substituting for meaningful assistance for people who have experienced crime and violence, and reinforcing poverty and racial inequality, mass incarceration has failed us all. It has particularly failed communities of color and low-income families by ensnaring, traumatizing, and stigmatizing millions. In seeking to end mass incarceration, our efforts to reduce the state’s power to punish must be tethered to policies and practices that reduce and ameliorate all forms of harm and suffering. True public safety requires no less.

This chapter explores why comprehensive sentencing reform and a twenty-year maximum sentence are essential to efforts to reverse mass incarceration. The widespread imposition of long and life sentences has contributed significantly to mass incarceration and is an ineffective and inefficient means of protecting public safety. Moreover, the proliferation of harsh sentencing laws has led to a dramatic decline in the share of cases that are adjudicated at trial and a notable increase in the penalty defendants pay for exercising their right to trial. Reliance on excessive sentences is also a costly approach to the problem of violence, one that consumes significant tax dollars that might otherwise be spent on evidence-based crime prevention programs, victim services, and restorative justice alternatives. While a twenty-year maximum sentence would mean a significant change in the United States, such a policy would bring the country into line with human rights norms and the practices of other democratic countries.

Judging by historical standards, it appears that the drug war is alive and well. This chapter identifies several factors that explain why recent drug policy reforms have had such a modest impact on drug arrests and incarceration. First, state lawmakers have focused overwhelmingly on reducing penalties for drug possession, but people who were convicted of this specific offense comprise a very small share (3.5 percent) of the prison population. Second, while reducing the use of confinement in cases involving drug distribution could have a more meaningful impact on the scale of incarceration, policy is moving in the opposite direction. Third, the ongoing commitment to drug war practices in rural and suburban areas is sustaining high drug arrest rates and incarceration. Finally, one of the most pervasive kinds of drug policy reforms—reliance on drug courts—is likely increasing rather than reducing drug arrests and incarceration. There is also evidence that drug courts enhance racial disparities in drug case outcomes.

Prevailing theories of poverty governance emphasize how political and economic constraints associated with urban neoliberalism have led to the retraction of protective welfare commitments and an increased criminalization of poverty. While research on this “disciplinary turn” has been generative, it tells us little about countervailing trends or how institutional responses to poverty change over time. Addressing these gaps, this article offers a case study of the emergence and acceptance by the business community of a supportive Housing First and harm reduction initiative called JustCARE—a distinct technique of poverty governance not readily explicable within existing theoretical frameworks. By situating JustCARE within a wider strategic action field of poverty governance, we reveal the macro-, meso-, and micro-level dynamics that together facilitated its inception, growth, and eventual embrace by members of the formerly hostile business establishment. Specifically, we underscore how two exogenous shocks (COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter [BLM] uprisings) enabled a well-positioned advocacy organization to articulate and implement a non-punitive homelessness response alternative. We conclude that field-based scholarship centering “theoretically deviant” cases can reveal how the contradictions and failures of neoliberal poverty management can generate unique opportunities for meaningful institutional change.

Misdemeanorland provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the lower courts’ response to the implementation of Broken Windows Policing in New York City and the flood of arrests this genera...

A growing body of work suggests that welfare and punishment should be understood as alternative, yet interconnected ways of governing poor and marginalized populations. While there is considerable evidence of a punitive turn in welfare and penal institutions over the past half century, recent studies show that welfare and carceral institutions increasingly comanage millions of people caught at the intersection of the welfare and penal sectors. The growth of “mass supervision” and the expansion of the social services sector help explain the blurring of welfare and punishment in the United States in daily practice. We suggest that these developments complicate the idea of an institutional trade-off and contend that welfare and punishment are best understood along a continuum of state management in which poor and socially marginalized populations are subjected to varying degrees of support, surveillance, and sanction. In presenting the punishment–welfare continuum, we pay particular attention to the “murky middle” between the two spheres: an interinstitutional space that has emerged in the context of mass supervision and a social services–centric safety net. We show that people caught in the “murky middle” receive some social supports and services, but also face pervasive surveillance and control and must adapt to the tangle of obligations and requirements in ways that both extend punishment and limit their ability to successfully participate in mainstream institutions.

This chapter analyses the process by which this mode of governance was adopted in the United States and examines the consequences of its adoption for international policy debates. It argues that the ascendance of the “get-tough” approach in the United States is a consequence of the reorientation of government policy around social control rather than social welfare. The chapter analyses the impact of growing rates of incarceration in the United States on assessments of the US economy and the welfare states of Western Europe. It also argues that the incarceration of large numbers of working-age men in the United States conceals a high level of persistent unemployment, particularly among African-American men. The effort to reshape government policy around social control rather than social welfare has had important consequences for US social policy, and in particular, for welfare programmes aimed at the poor. The “American model”, ostensibly characterised by an unregulated labour market, is contrasted with the co-called “Continental model”.

Although the wisdom of mass incarceration is now widely questioned, incarceration rates have fallen far less than what would be predicted on the basis of crime trends. Informed by institutional studies of path dependence, sociolegal scholarship on legal discretion, and research suggesting that “late mass incarceration” is characterized by a moderated response to nonviolent crime but even stronger penalties for violent offenses, this article analyzes recent sentencing‐related reforms and case processing outcomes. Although the legislative findings reveal widespread willingness to moderate penalties for nonviolent crimes, the results also reveal a notably heightened system response to both violent and nonviolent crimes at the level of case processing. These findings help explain why the decline in incarceration rates has been notably smaller than the drop in crime rates and are consistent with the literature on path dependence, which emphasizes that massive institutional developments enhance the capacity and motivation of institutional actors to preserve jobs, resources, and authorities. The findings also underscore the importance of analyzing on‐the‐ground case processing outcomes as well as formal law when assessing the state and fate of complex institutional developments such as mass incarceration.

Mass incarceration is an unprecedented development, one with myriad adverse consequences. Although the expansion of US penal institutions is largely a function of changes in practice and policy rather than rising crime rates, reversing this trend will nonetheless be challenging. The need for comprehensive sentencing reform is clear, but political limits on legislative remedies and the failure of the courts to notably reduce the scale, or improve conditions, of confinement render these approaches highly uncertain. In the short term, unconventional methods that do not require legislative authorization, such as electing, pressuring, and incentivizing prosecutors to reduce penal severity, may be a promising way of addressing mass incarceration. The return and revitalization of parole or other systems of post-sentence review are also crucial and may be legitimated in terms of the need to incentivize rehabilitation and prevent the unnecessary and costly incarceration of the elderly. The recent mobilization of grass-roots movements for penal change that include those directly affected by both violence and mass incarceration is also auspicious, as their work may help to humanize the justice-involved and undermine the erroneous assumption that crime survivors are well-served by mass incarceration.

Seattle deploys several mechanisms by which individuals’ presence in particular spaces can constitute a crime. Through a range of means, police in Seattle are given wide authority to question and arrest those who appear as human manifestations of the “disorder” that is of concern to many. Importantly, these programs accentuate the power of criminal law by mobilizing other forms of law, most notably civil law and administrative law. This legally-hybrid structure works to accentuate the police’s power notably. Yet increased police power does not actually work to reduce “disorder” to any appreciable extent. For this reason, and others, we suggest that different approaches to addressing social marginality represent more promising avenues for cities like Seattle to explore.

Recent drops in the U.S. rate of incarceration have triggered much discussion regarding the fate of mass incarceration. Some observers suggest that the political consensus in favor of getting tough on crime has been shattered and replaced by a new consensus that the prison population must be downsized. In this article, we explore the possibility that neither legislation nor public discourse around crime and punishment has shifted so dramatically, and that the cultural dynamics surrounding reform efforts may undermine the prospects of comprehensive sentencing reform. To assess these hypotheses, we analyze trends in criminal justice policy reform from 2000 to 2013 and newspaper stories and editorials on criminal justice reform since 2008. While we do find important examples of changing rhetoric and policy, we suggest that these changes do not constitute a “paradigm shift.” Rather, they are indicative of a more subtle, complex, and contradictory modification of the way punishment is conceived, discussed, and ultimately enacted.

The tangled web of race, policing, and justice in America.

On the basis of the converging evidence showing regulation of drinking behavior by 5-HT3AB receptors and the serotonin transporter, we hypothesized that the interactive effects of genetic variations in the genes HTR3A, HTR3B, and SLC6A4 confer greater susceptibility to alcohol dependence (AD) than do their effects individually. We examined the associations of AD with 22 SNPs across HTR3A, HTR3B, and two functional variants in SLC6A4 in 500 AD and 280 healthy control individuals of European descent. We found that the alleles of the low-frequency SNPs rs33940208:T in HTR3A and rs2276305:A in HTR3B were inversely and nominally significantly associated with AD with odds ratio (OR) and 95 % confidence interval of 0.212 and 0.073, 0.616 (P = 0.004) and 0.261 and 0.088, 0.777 (P = 0.016), respectively. Further, our gene-by-gene interaction analysis revealed that two four-variant models that differed by only one SNP carried a risk for AD (empirical P

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.

Research Summary Substantial fees and fines now are now routinely imposed by courts and other criminal justice agencies across the United States. This article summarizes research on the imposition of monetary sanctions in the United States and shows how they differ from European day fines. In the contemporary United States, court-imposed legal financial obligations supplement other criminal penalties in the majority of felony and misdemeanor cases. Judges impose many fees and fines at their discretion, and evidence from Washington State indicates that extralegal factors–including ethnicity–influence their assessment. Many states have also authorized jails, departments of correction, and probation offices to levy fees. In the United States, fees and fine amounts are determined by statute and are not tethered to defendants’ earnings. Recent studies suggest that the assessment of these penalties often generate long-term debts that are sizeable relative to expected earnings and impede reintegration. Policy Implications This essay contends that the disadvantages of the widespread and discretionary imposition of substantial and supplementary financial penalties outweigh any benefits associated with this practice. Proponents of correctional and court fees argue that offenders—not taxpayers—should pay for the cost of punishing their misdeeds. The idea that offenders should foot the bill for criminal justice expenditures is a moral and political claim, one that likely has broad appeal. Nonetheless, this claim is in tension with at least two other important principles. First, public criminal law systems rest on the premise that crime is mainly a wrong against the state; violations of criminal law are thought to be significant enough to warrant the state's usurpation of the dispute resolution process. Compelling defendants to reimburse the state for its criminal justice expenditures is in tension with this principle. Moreover, unlike users of other services for which fees are assessed, penal targets are compelled to partake of these services; they cannot use fewer of them or look for an alternative provider of them. It can be argued that if the state compels penal targets to use (often expensive and ineffective) state “services,” then the government is obligated to pay for them. Indeed, this fiscal obligation is arguably an important check on government power. Competing moral and political arguments regarding the appropriateness of assessing fees to recoup criminal justice expenditures thus exist. Even if it were universally accepted, the idea that offenders should pay for their adjudication, punishment and rehabilitation must be balanced against policy and practical considerations, as well as against ethical issues concerning justice and fairness. Our analysis pertains only to the imposition of fees and fines in the contemporary United States and does not extend to European-style imposition of day fines. The widespread assessment of substantial and nongraduated fees and fines lacks a convincing penological rationale, is incompatible with policy efforts to facilitate reintegration, and raises numerous concerns about justice and fairness. At least in theory, penal policies are aimed at incapacitation, rehabilitation, deterrence, and retribution. Monetary sanctions do not appear to accomplish any of these goals. By definition, monetary sanctions do not prevent crime by incapacitating offenders. Theoretically, monetary sanctions might be rehabilitative if their repeal was offered as a reward for participation in rehabilitative programs or prosocial outcomes. Yet erasure of legal debt generally is not offered as a reward for good behavior. For a penalty to effectively deter wrong-doing, its consequences must be known to potential offenders as they contemplate their options; swiftness and certainty are key. But the assessment of monetary sanctions is characterized by neither swiftness nor certainty. Finally, because monetary penalties in the United States are supplements to criminal penalties that already are comparatively severe, directly and adversely impact the partners and children of the criminally convicted, and typically remain in effect long after all other elements of criminal sentences are completed, they are disproportionate to the offense and, hence, approach vengeance rather than retribution. Monetary sanctions also complicate reintegration. An estimated 700,000 inmates return to civil society from jail or prison every year. In this context, researchers and policy makers increasingly emphasize the need to facilitate the reintegration and stabilization of the criminally convicted. Yet there is evidence that the widespread imposition of substantial and nongraduated fees and fines impedes reentry. For example, legal debt tends to be long term due to the low earning power of the criminally sanctioned, the magnitude of the sanctions imposed, and the accrual of interest. Monetary sanctions imposed by the criminal justice system thus constitute an additional, substantial, and often long-term financial liability for people living with a criminal conviction. Like other types of debt, legal debt reduces access to housing, credit, and employment; it also limits possibilities for improving one's educational or occupational situation. Unpaid legal debt can lead to a warrant, an arrest, and/or incarceration. In some locales, legal debtors also are denied drivers’ licenses, a practice that creates an additional barrier to employment. Legal debt thus has a variety of adverse and destabilizing consequences for those who possess it, including the threat of arrest and incarceration. The widespread imposition and collection of substantial and supplementary monetary sanctions in the United States also raises several important concerns about fairness and justice. In particular, nongraduated monetary penalties supplement already severe confinement sentences, impose a disproportionate burden on the poor, and are, at least in Washington State, influenced by various extralegal factors, including ethnicity. These penalties also directly and adversely affect family members, lead with some frequency to the arrest and incarceration of debtors, and raise important questions about the meaning and legacy of Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). Moreover, the collection of fees and fines to fund government operations is of uncertain fiscal benefit to the state. A comprehensive assessment of the fiscal benefit to the state of imposing fees and fines must consider both the direct and indirect costs associated with the collection of LFOs. It is unclear that the results of this mathematical exercise would, if the necessary data were available, show that the imposition and collection of LFOs is a net financial gain. Even if revenues from fees and fines are greater than the expenditures devoted to their collection, dependence on this private funding source for criminal justice operations arguably compromises the integrity of courts and creates conflicts of interest for judges. This essay concludes that the widespread imposition of nongraduated, supplementary and substantial monetary penalties by U.S. criminal justice agencies lacks a convincing penological rationale, is incompatible with policy efforts to facilitate reentry, raises important concerns about fairness and justice, is of uncertain financial benefit to the state, and arguably compromises the integrity of the courts.

Recent research suggests that the use of monetary sanctions as a supplementary penalty in state and federal criminal courts is expanding, and that their imposition creates substantial and deleterious legal debt. Little is known, however, about the factors that influence the discretionary imposition of these penalties. This study offers a comprehensive account of the role socio-cultural factors, especially race and ethnicity, have in this institutional sanctioning process. We rely on multilevel statistical analysis of the imposition of monetary sanctions in Washington State courts to test our theory. The theoretical framework emphasizes the need to treat race and ethnicity as complex cultural categories, the meaning and institutional effects of which may vary across time and space. Findings indicate that racialized crime scripts, such as the association of Latinos with drugs, affect defendants whose wrong-doing is stereotype congruent. Moreover, all individuals accused of committing racially and ethnically stigmatized offenses in racialized contexts may experience the courtesy stigma that flows from racialization. We find that race and ethnicity are not just individual attributes but cultural categories that shape the distribution of stigma and the institutional consequences that flow from it.

In post–civil rights America, the ascendance of “law-and-order” politics and “postracial” ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Countervailing sociolegal changes render this framework particularly problematic. On the one hand, the definition of racism has contracted in antidiscrimination law and in many social scientific studies of criminal justice, so that racism is defined narrowly as intentional and causally discrete harm. On the other hand, criminal justice institutions have expanded to affect historically unprecedented numbers of people of color, with penal policies broadening in ways that render the identification of racial intent and causation especially difficult. Analyses employing the penology of racial innocence examine the ever-expanding criminal justice system with limited definitions of racism, ultimately contributing to the erasure of racial power. Both racism and criminal justice operate in systemic and serpentine ways; our conceptual tools and methods, therefore, need to be equally systemic and capacious.

Banishment is an increasingly common tool for urban social control. In Seattle and other cities, new tools give the police stronger authority to create and enforce zones of exclusion. Deployed most commonly in neighborhoods populated by homeless people and members of other disadvantaged populations, banishment orders seek to coerce individuals to relocate. As an attempt to reduce crime and disorder, however, we suggest that banishment fails. We demonstrate this by drawing on interviews with forty-one Seattle residents who live with at least one exclusion order to ascertain how their strong connections to place make compliance with banishment an oppressive burden. Even if banishment increases the authority of the police, and thereby helps them to respond to public concern about ‘disorder’, it makes everyday life more perilous for the socially-marginalized. This suggests that banishment's increased popularity deserves robust contestation.

The expansion of the U.S. penal system has important consequences for poverty and inequality, yet little is known about the imposition of monetary sanctions. This study analyzes national and state‐level court data to assess their imposition and interview data to identify their social and legal consequences. Findings indicate that monetary sanctions are imposed on a substantial majority of the millions of people convicted of crimes in the United States annually and that legal debt is substantial relative to expected earnings. This indebtedness reproduces disadvantage by reducing family income, by limiting access to opportunities and resources, and by increasing the likelihood of ongoing criminal justice involvement.

We use this article to argue for greater recognition of legally imposed spatial exclusion—banishment—as a (re)emerging and consequential social control practice. Although the new social control techniques that entail banishment are buttressed by a blend of civil, administrative, and criminal law, they are best understood as punitive in nature. This argument is supported by two empirical findings. First, interviews with the banished indicate that spatial exclusion often has significant negative consequences akin to those identified by Sykes (1958) in his seminal account of the pains of imprisonment. Second, court data show that the growing use of civil and administrative banishment has increased the number of criminal cases involving allegations of noncompliance. These findings suggest that analysts of punishment might usefully broaden their focus to include phenomena that combine civil, criminal, and legal authority, and are not defined as punishment by their advocates.

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.

My foray into public scholarship began in 2003, when attorneys from Seattle’s Racial Disparity Project asked me to conduct research on Seattle drug markets and drug arrests. Prior to this time, my research focused on the politics of crime, law and punishment, mostly at the national level. Although I wrote about controversial political and institutional dynamics, I remained at some remove from my subject matter, as well as from affected and concerned publics. My collaboration with the Racial Disparity Project, however, fundamentally altered my work—and my perspective on the academic mission. Seattle’s Racial Disparity Project is housed in The Defender Association, one of several non-profit agencies in King County, Washington that provide legal representation to indigent criminal defendants. It has also received funding from the Justice Department, the Open Society Institute, the Racial Justice Collaborative, the JEHT Foundation, and others to conduct research and advocacy on issues that disproportionately affect Seattle’s communities of color. On the basis of discussions with organizations working in such communities, judges, and others, attorneys from the Racial Disparity Project identified the drug war as a key issue. When I was approached in 2003, the Racial Disparity Project was looking for a researcher to identify the racial and ethnic composition of those arrested for delivering illegal drugs in Seattle and compare this information with the best available data regarding those who engage in this behavior. Although I had written about drug markets and drug policy from a national perspective, I had not had the opportunity (or inclination) to delve into the dynamics surrounding local drug markets or the policing thereof. I was intrigued by the prospect, despite its obvious challenges, and agreed to conduct the requested research on behalf of the Racial Disparity Project. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into.

The unprecedented increase in U.S. rates of criminal conviction, criminal justice supervi sion, and incarceration constitute a historical ly unique experiment in penal expansion. In creasingly, scholars and activists are investi gating the impacts of this uniquely American policy innovation on public safety, families, children, poverty, and employment (Clear et al. 2003; Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2003; Patil lo et al. 2004; Pettit and Western 2004; Travis and Waul 2004; Western 2006). These studies indicate that the massive expansion of the U.S. criminal justice system has had adverse consequences for the incarcerated and the poor communities from which they are over whelmingly drawn. Recent studies also sug gest that the removal of over two million res idents from official statistics has important implications for measures of social problems such as unemployment and poverty (Western and Beckett 1999; Western and Pettit 2005). While criminologists have long explored how social inequities shape who commits crime and who is punished for doing so, recent scholarship increasingly investigates how pe nal expansion masks yet reproduces social and racial inequality. By highlighting the impact of penal ex pansion on citizenship and democracy, The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons and Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and Ameri can Democracy make a significant and novel contribution to this burgeoning literature. Of the two, Locked Out is the more empirical. By bringing varied data sources, diverse methodologies, and a refreshing creativity to bear on this important topic, Manza and Uggen make a significant contribution to a number of sociological literatures. The Disen franchisement of Ex-Felons offers less origi nal data analysis but greater attention to the legal aspects of felony disenfranchisement. Both books offer compelling historical and philosophical reflections on the nature and significance of the denial of what the Supreme Court has called "the right preserv ative of all other rights" (Hull, p. 1). While the conclusions of the two books are largely compatible, they offer somewhat divergent The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons, by Elizabeth A. Hull. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006. 217pp. $19.50 paper. ISBN: 1592131859. $59.50 cloth. ISBN: 1592131840.

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.

This article draws on several unique data sources to assess and explain racial disparity in Seattle's drug delivery arrests. Evidence regarding the racial and ethnic composition of those who deliver any of five serious drugs in that city is compared with the racial and ethnic composition of those arrested for this offense. Our findings indicate that blacks are significantly overrepresented among Seattle's drug delivery arrestees. Several organizational practices explain racial disparity in these arrests: law enforcement's focus on crack offenders, the priority placed on outdoor drug venues, and the geographic concentration of police resources in racially heterogeneous areas. The available evidence further indicates that these practices are not determined by race-neutral factors such as crime rates or community complaints. Our findings thus indicate that race shapes perceptions of who and what constitutes Seattle's drug problem, as well as the organizational response to that problem.