The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America by Todd R. Clear & Natasha A. Frost

Author:Todd R. Clear & Natasha A. Frost [Clear, Todd R.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2013-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Disconnect between Crime and Punishment

Perhaps no criminological fact is as agreed upon as the fact that we have not been particularly successful in our attempt to incarcerate our way out of crime. When we lock up more people, crime does not necessarily go down. As importantly, crime declines—sometimes quite substantial crime declines—do not seem to translate into decreasing prison use. While imprisonment increased in every year between 1973 and 2009, over that same period crime variably increased, decreased, or stabilized. Figure 2.5 demonstrates the apparent disconnect between crime and imprisonment through tracking the trends in crime and in imprisonment in the United States over the past several decades.

From the mid-1990s on, crime was on the decline regardless of what a place did in terms of incarceration.2 Places that continued to dramatically increase prison populations experienced decreases in crime, but so did places that did not dramatically increase prison populations. Most empirical research on the relationship between crime and imprisonment suggests that crime (particularly violent crime) can explain some, but certainly nothing like all, of the variation in growth in imprisonment over time and across places.3 In other words, while crime and imprisonment are clearly not completely disconnected, there is plenty of “unexplained variance.” As Todd Clear has previously argued,

If it is absurd to think that prisons have nothing to do with crime, it is abidingly difficult to determine precisely how prisons affect crime. It may be that locking up a particular prisoner averts crimes that prisoner might have committed had he been free. It might also be that the desire to avoid prison makes some people decide against a temptation to engage in crime. But it cannot be the case that this is the only—indeed, even the main—way prisons are related to crime.4

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