See Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn, eds..

First, in our own analysis of data similar to Enns’s (Figure 7), we find that the rise (and fall) in punitiveness is characteristic of not just white but also black opinion. Our argument thus far has explained why incarceration grew and also why America is exceptionally punitive, but we have yet to say very much about inequalities in exposure to police and prisons. … Data are from the Roper Center, the General Social Survey, and the American National Election Survey.

Age-adjusted crime rates show that crime rose considerably among all age groups.22 Why? Yet nothing in this denunciation requires us to ignore the reality of crime and violence. Given this, how should we think about the causal relevance of race to American mass incarceration? Today, America ranks among the most punitive states in world history — second only to the Soviet Union under Stalin. Articles reflect many disciplines; our geographical scope is global; authors include activists, independent scholars, and poets, as well as academics. Violence rose in rural, urban, and suburban areas, but the rise was concentrated in central cities. First, we observe no comparable increase in homicide after the first great migration. But the baby boom cannot explain most of the crime rise. None of this is to dismiss the role of racism in fashioning a new punitive common sense. She traces it to the anti-imperialist uprisings in the Global South and with the United States. Such aversions were commonplace; embodied in restrictive covenants and a violent defense of the “color line.” But the growth of the suburbs in this period is arguably better understood as a case of capital flight, enabled by America’s peculiar fiscal geography. Trump Has Made Things Worse. Moreover, those who make this claim commit the mistake of comparing a stock (the total prison population in a given year) to a flow (the rate of crime per year). Figure 3 plots trends in homicide, property crimes, and violent crimes.16 It shows that between 1960 and the peak of the crime wave, the homicide rate roughly doubled, the property crime rate trebled, and the violent crime rate quintupled.17 There is also evidence that the increase in violence was concentrated in urban areas, with African Americans disproportionately likely to be both offenders and victims.18, The rise in crime was in some part the unsurprising result of demographic trends at mid-century. On the liberal view, however, the crime rate was additionally (and primarily) governed by a second set ofsocial policies: welfare, unemployment, housing, education, and health care. Data are from the OECD. The arguments of the previous sections furnish an answer. Socialism and Democracy is committed to showing the continuing relevance of socialist politics and vision.
This figure shows the violent crime rate and the prison incarceration rate from 1960 to the present. The United States began seeing a large rise in its incarceration rates beginning in the 1970’s. The ultimate causes of liberal failure lie outside the state, in the incapacity of the American poor to compel redistribution from the rich. Even if the mayor of Ferguson had the gall to tax and redistribute to fight the root causes of crime in his area, he could never tax San Francisco’s billionaires. More than 50 percent of local clients had their cases dismissed, and the forfeiture rate (those who did not appear for court) was 9 percent. Some of the increase in this ratio between 1970 and 2017 could be due to selection, since the share of the population without a high school degree declined. Second, there are no racial disparities in homicide in the rural South, where this culture supposedly came from (Catherine Cubbin, Linda Williams Pickle, and Lois Fingerhut, “Social context and geographic patterns of homicide among US black and white males,” American Journal of Public Health 90 [April 2000]). Most importantly, by leading progressives to misdiagnose the source of racial disparities in punishment, it makes it impossible to wage effective war against them. Most of the contemporary discussion has focused on the first. Racial disparities in homicide victimization were stable over the 1960s (both black and white homicides roughly doubled) but disparities in arrest for robbery, rape, and property crime appear to have risen over the decade, generally peaking in the early 1970s. Arrest data from Uniform Crime Reports include both rural and urban arrests.

Rising urban un- and under-employment, especially for poor black men, together with a deterioration of education and social service provision, meant a reduction in legitimate forms of income generation. The point is that waging an all-out war on the root causes of crime is equivalent to the task of building a large, redistributive welfare state that takes from the rich to give to the poor.

This contributed to a sharp increase in inequality among African Americans.

Racial disparities are mostly not a result of the injustice of biased treatment inside the criminal justice system, but rather the foundational injustice of American racial inequality outside it. Second, as was evident in the 1960s, the local state is especially vulnerable to the flight of its tax base. The result was a rise in violence that was historically unique in its speed and ferocity. But this revision does not take the barriers to social policy seriously enough. The perspective is broadly Marxist, encouraging not only critique of the status quo, but also informed analysis of the many different approaches to bringing about fundamental change, and seeking to integrate issues of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality with the traditional focus on class. Today, America ranks among the most punitive states in world history — second only to the Soviet Union under Stalin. Crime rose inexorably in the 1960s, seemingly impervious to a variety of liberal initiatives, and despite almost continuous attention to the issue by the Johnson administration. It is well-known that it is not.60 Rather, the point is that even underdeveloped social policy costs more than overdeveloped penal policy. Those with substance use disorder have a 190 percent chance of overdosing once released from jail because of the forced detox (cold turkey), no treatment in jail and a decreased tolerance to opioids. The report of the Kerner Commission ends with four recommendations to fix urban disorder: expand welfare, expand housing, transform education, and create jobs. Enns does show evidence from campaign documents at the time suggesting that politicians were reacting to, rather than fashioning, the public’s views, but one could still object that rising punitiveness might just have been a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement rather than a response to crime.
First, the rich live in certain areas but not in others. Crime data are from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and imprisonment data are from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. To be politically feasible, it must often be universal. In selling “get tough” politics to white Americans, politicians profited from racist tropes about black Americans. Data (and definitions) are from Lindert, Growing Public, By 1960, America was already well-established as a welfare laggard. From 1960 to 1990, as Figure 3 shows, the homicide rate doubled, the property crime rate trebled, and the violent crime rate roughly quintupled. Federal actors may have made some difference on the margins, since they redirected funding, organized research and development, and fought a disproportionate share of the War on Drugs. This interpretation fits recent case studies of black communities in Harlem and Washington, DC, in which it is argued that public panic about rising, high crime rates came to dominate black politics in this same period.51, Second, if the standard story were right, over-time trends in white public opinion should mirror over-time trends in the strength of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1960, less than 8 percent were. First, and most uncontroversially, there is substantial over-time agreement in the rate of homicide reported by both police and mortality statistics. The incarceration rate among those with less than a high school education has skyrocketed, while the incarceration rate amongst college graduates (both black and white) has declined (see Figure 2).8 If white elites contrived mass incarceration to control newly enfranchised African Americans, why has the probability of a black college graduate going to prison halved over this period?9 In 2017, a white high school dropout was about fifteen times more likely to be in prison than a black college graduate.10. This ratio would change very little over the next few decades.67. Again, we estimate this by the institutionalization rate for men aged eighteen to fifty with a college degree (or more), which was 0.54 percent in 1970. Without the rise in crime and the ensuing public panic, the rise in incarceration would not have transpired. Henry is a LICSW, MSW and PhD candidate studying behavioral health policy and has experience providing direct clinical services to persons with severe mental illness involved with the criminal justice system. This figure shows trends in two ratios: (1) the ratio of black to white institutionalization rates; (2) the ratio of the institutionalization rates of high school dropouts to college graduates. In 1910, almost half of working-age black men in America were employed in the agricultural sector. And thus, it is much cheaper to build a harsh penal apparatus than to build a generous welfare state. This figure shows the proportion of men aged eighteen to fifty, living in central cities, who were neither in a job nor in school in the census year, disaggregated by skill level and region.

This was what the crises of the 1960s required, they argued. But these movements never had more than a tenuous hold on the party establishment itself, which limited severely what they could win. Petitioner appealed, arguing that the superior court’s bail order violated his right to due process because the judge failed to give adequate consideration to his financial resources. There are few more important questions to pose about American punishment than this one. This overstates the case. Yet this conventional account has some fatal flaws. Most of the growth in the ratio of black to white incarceration occurred in an earlier period of American history (1880–1970), after the end of slavery and during the first Great Migration.6 Since 1990, it has been declining.7. Cash bail: generally used for a flight risk, the accused/defendant pays the full amount of bail in cash. This is because the denominators are not equivalent. Gary LaFree, “Race and Crime Trends in the United States, 1946–1990” in Darnell Hawkins (ed. At root the issue is not one of attitudes or motivation, but capacity.


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