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24 Berkeley J. Crim. L. 1 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/bjcl24 and id is 1 raw text is: Measuring Changes in Incarceration Rates: Shifts in Carceral Intensity as Felt by Communities Kevin R. Reitz t In tro d u ctio n .............................................................................................. 1 A. Three Illustrations of the Problem ...................................... 5 B. PCM versus ACM: 50-State Rankings ............................... 9 Part 1. Static M easurement of Carceral Intensity ................................... 12 Part 2. Percentage Change versus Absolute Change .............................. 13 P art 3. R eality C hecks ....................................................................... 14 A. PCM-ACM Divergences Across All 50 States ................. 17 Part 4. Assessing the Benefits of the Percentage-Change Measure ....... 20 Part 5. A n A lternative B aseline .............................................................. 26 Part 6. Measuring Person Years of Incarceration .............................. 31 C o n clu sio n ...................................................................................... . . 3 5 A p p en d ix ....................................................................................... . . . 3 8 INTRODUCTION Incarceration rates (numbers of prisoners per capita) are a basic indicator of how government's use of the prison sanction permeates into the population as a whole-a concept I will call carceral intensity. If we view incarceration as a subtraction from the life of a community-or a succession of blows that are felt by the community-then the density DOI: https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38B27PR7N Copyright © 2019 Regents of University of California T James Annenberg La Vea Professor of Criminal Procedure, University of Minnesota Law School; Co-Director, Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Justice. This article grew out of a series of conversations with Frank Zimring, Anthony Doob, Richard Frase, and Tapio Lappi-Seppala. My thinking was advanced by the approach used in Cheryl Marie Webster & Anthony N. Doob, Penal Optimism: Understanding American Mass Imprisonment from a Canadian Perspective, in AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IN CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 126 27, 128 29 tbl. 3.1, 169 n.7, 179 80 app. 3A.1. (Kevin R. Reitz ed., 2018),