Building the prison state : race and the politics of mass incarceration / Heather Schoenfeld.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schoenfeld, Heather, author.

Series:

Chicago series in law and society

The Chicago series in law and society

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prisons--Florida.

Prisons.

Criminal justice, Administration of--Florida.

Criminal justice, Administration of.

Crime and race--Florida.

Crime and race.

Criminal law--Florida.

Criminal law.

Florida.

Physical Description:

370 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Summary:

The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world-about 1 in 100 adults, or more than 2 million people. In the last few decades, spending on corrections has quadrupled, and the resulting prison state has deepened race and class divisions. How and why did we become the world's leading jailer? And what can we, as a society, do about it? Reframing the contemporary story of mass incarceration, Heather Schoenfeld illustrates how the unfinished task of full equality for African Americans led to the expansion of the government's power to punish, even when its policies were designed to protect individuals from arbitrary state violence. Examining civil rights protests, prison condition lawsuits, sentencing reforms, the War on Drugs, and the rise of conservative Tea Party politics in Florida, Schoenfeld explains why politicians veered from skepticism of prisons to an embrace of incarceration as the appropriate response to violent and nonviolent crime. In order to substantially reduce the number of people behind bars, Schoenfeld argues, we must transform the political incentives for imprisonment and develop a new ideological basis for punishment based on an inclusive social and political community. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 A New Perspective on the Carceral State 1

Chapter 2 Penal Modernization in the Civil Rights Era, 1954-1970 30

Chapter 3 Prison Overcrowding and the Legal Challenge to Florida's Prison System, 1970-1980 66

Chapter 4 The Unintended Consequences of Prison Litigation, 1980-1991 90

Chapter 5 The Politics of Early Release, 1991-1995 122

Chapter 6 Republicans, Prosecutors, and the Carceral Ethos, 1995-2008 157

Chapter 7 Recession-Era Colorblind Politics and the Challenge of Decarceration, 2008-2016 192

Chapter 8 Toward a New Ethos 217.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226520964

022652096X

9780226521015

022652101X

OCLC:

993622909