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46 Law & Soc. Inquiry 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/lsociq46 and id is 1 raw text is: Law& Law & Social Inquiry Social Volume 46, Issue 1, 1-31, February 2021 Inquiry The Place of Punishment in Twenty-First- Century America: Understanding the Persistence of Mass Incarceration Katherine Beckett and Lindsey Beach This study analyzes prison admission and crime data to assess whether the penal system's response to crime has continued to intensify since mass incarceration's peak and whether the increasing use of prison in nonurban areas helps explain this trend. The findings show that penal intensity has continued to escalate despite falling crime rates and widespread efforts to reduce prison populations. Further, the justice system's response to crime is most vigorous in nonurban, and especially rural, counties, where more felony arrests for all types of offenses result in a prison sentence. Although not new, this geo- graphic difference has grown in recent years. While penal intensity thus varies notably within states, case outcomes also vary markedly across states. Comparative case studies of dynamics in a highly punitive state (Kentucky) and a less punitive state (Washington) show how formal law interacts with local dynamics not only by creating statutory hammers that are utilized by zealous prosecutors and judges but also by limiting the impact of aggressive prosecutorial practices on prison sentences. INTRODUCTION The extraordinary expansion of the US penal system has stimulated much research regarding mass incarceration's causes and consequences. From the 1980s through the mid-2000s, criminal justice rhetoric, policy, and case outcomes shifted in a decidedly punitive direction across the country (Mauer 2006; Western 2006; Travis, Western and Redburn 2014; Pew Charitable Trusts 2016; Kang-Brown et al. 2018). The result was the creation of the largest incarcerated population the world has ever known (Gramlich 2018). Developments since the mid-2000s have been more mixed. US incar- ceration rates peaked in 2007 and have fallen modestly since that time. In 2016, the US incarceration rate reached its lowest level in twenty years, though it was still remarkably high by international standards (Gramlich 2018). This decline has been attributed to a number of factors, including the widespread adoption of state sentencing reforms aimed at reducing prison populations (Subramania and Moreno 2014; Beckett, Reosti, and Knaphus 2016; Gramlich 2018). Katherine Beckett S. is Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology and Professor, Department of Law, Societies and Justice, University of Washington, Email: kbeckett~uw.edu Lindsey Beach is a PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Email: beachl@uw.edu Many thanks to three anonymous Law & Social Inquiry reviewers for their thoughtful comments and sug- gestions. Analysis of the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) data presented in this article is authorized by the University of Washington's Human Subjects Division Agreement no. 08747. (c) 2020 American Rar Foundation. 1