The Macho Penal Economy: Mass Incarceration in the United States - A European Perspective

The rise of mass incarceration in the USA is related to the historic character of American exceptionalism and the abandonment, over the past few decades, of policies of rehabilitation and radical social reform. The components for a compararable penal expansion are, with the exception of high rates o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Punishment & society 2001-01, Vol.3 (1), p.61-80
Main Author: DOWNES, DAVID
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African-Americans
Blacks
Crime
Criminal justice
Criminal Justice Policy
Criminal sentencing
Criminal sociology
Criminology
Cross-national analysis
Deregulation
Europe
Growth
Imprisonment
Liberal democracy
Market Economy
Offenders
Penal policy
Penal Reform
Prisoners
Prisons
Social Democracy
Social exclusion
Social problems
Society
Sociological research
U.S.A
United States of America
USA
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Summary:The rise of mass incarceration in the USA is related to the historic character of American exceptionalism and the abandonment, over the past few decades, of policies of rehabilitation and radical social reform. The components for a compararable penal expansion are, with the exception of high rates of lethal violence, in process of assembly in some European societies: rates of serious property crime surpassing those in the USA; a shift in the politics of law and order towards `governing through crime' and populist punitiveness; and rising anxieties about risk and insecurity, in particular relating to ethnic minorities and crime. The distinctive character of social democratic societies, which has so far shielded them against mass incarceration and which already face challenge due to globalization, face further adverse comparison with the more deregulated US economy in terms of unemployment rates which are significantly distorted by the size of the American prison population. Economic debate should be better informed of the unprecedented extent to which the penal factor has come to exert a hidden influence on cross-national images of socioeconomic success and failure, and of the costs and benefits of social-democratic relative to more deregulated market economies.
ISSN:1462-4745
1741-3095
DOI:10.1177/14624740122228258