Mass Incarceration Political Progression Through CRT and PET By Isabelle Jensen Mentored by Dr. Rosanna Perotti Mass Incarceration History
Why did Mass Incarceration happen? Why was there so much hard on crime policy? Why did our regulation of crime and criminal justice change so much?
Theories Overview
Beginning of War on Crime and War on Drugs ● ● ● ● ● ●
Rising fear of crime in the 1960s despite consistent crime rates President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the War on Crime Both Democrats and Republicans were for harsher crime policies and more funding for police officers Nixon expanded and pushed for the War much harder Nixon created many urban crime prevention programs Nixon began the War on Drugs that came from the War on Crime
Ronald Reagan ● ● ● ●
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Reagan was against social programs and for strong punishment Spoke about crime, drugs, and immorality as linked Reduced social spending but increased police and prison spending The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 reinstated the death penalty, got rid of federal parole system, and expanded pretrial detention. It also started the the three strikes rule and created mandatory minimums for firearms. The Anti– Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established many drug mandatory minimums including the infamous 100-to-1 cocaine and crack disparity
Critical Race Theory (CRT) Critical Race Theory(CRT) is a dynamic movement and legal theory that emphasises the importance and expansive effect of race on our systems in America. It questions the neutrality of law and legal precedent. It argues that race is a “hegemonic component of American society.” It is the overarching factor that controls our country not always but incredibly often. CRT rejects liberal ideas of legal colorblindness and meritocracy. It aims to dismantle ideas of inherent progress within our society or the belief that we live in a post racial America. It was formed as an oppositional scholarship to the norms of the white experience and traditional legal theory.
Bill Clinton ● ●
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Democrat who was still very tough on crime and eager to prove it Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 ○ Three strikes means life sentence ○ $9 billion in prison funds ○ Extended death penalty ○ Mandatory minimums ○ Truth in sentencing incentives Clinton authorized the US Sentencing Commission to study 100-to-1 cocaine to crack disparity and said it should be eradicated but no action was taken
Barack Obama ● ● ● ●
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Acknowledgement of Mass incarceration and tough on crime as an issue First sitting president to visit a federal prison Was open about his own previous drug use (marijuana and cocaine) In 2010 Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act that lessened the cocaine crack discrepancy to 18 to 1 and ended five year mandatory minimums for crack possession Obama requested more money for drug courts and rehab programs Rhetoric changed the way people thought about crime
Racism as normal and structural White supremacy is ingrained in all structures. Individual racist actions are not the problem but a symptom of a society built on racism. Racism is a structural and institutional issue. It is an ordinary part of life for all of us whether we notice it or not. The systems we live under and participate in were built with racism as a substructure. They continue to perpetuate the ideas they were built under intentionally or not. If we take all the racists out of a system, the system is still racist.
Interest Convergence
Race as a Social Construct
A theory coined by Derrick Bell claims that progress is only made in achieving racial equality if the interests of Black people align with some interest of powerful whites.
Race is a product of society and is not an objective or fixed reality. There is no biological or genetic component to what we have qualified as race. The reason their statistics are different is not because of their physical or biological features but rather the way they are treated by society that sets them apart. A good way to show that this is a social construct is the dynamic nature of race. Overtime whiteness, the racial identity, has expanded to include more groups. Irishmen have always been physically white but they were not always considered white.
Example: Brown v. Board of Education 1954 African American soldiers were returning from Korea where they had been treated as equals. The rampant racism in the US was bad for the reputation of capitalism during the Cold War. Legal historians found memos about improving the US image in the eyes of the Third World.
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) describes policy progression over time through long periods of stability or equilibrium punctuated with drastic and short lived change. The way the United States government is organized lends itself to stagnation that is rarely disrupted on individual issues. Policy progress is not a smooth linear progression but it is a staircase of progress. Short periods of progress are preceded and followed by a plateau of uniformity. These dramatic changes are resisted by those in control of the policy issue at hand. PET branches from pluralism which states that “due to the limited attention, time and expertise of decision makers, power tends to be distributed among more specialized subsystems, where decisions that are often considered rather technical or routine are made.”
Policy image is the way an issue is understood and framed in policy, both to those who occupy subsystems and the public. The public policy image is based on a set of facts that are interpreted, usually to tell a story. Due to its mix of values and facts, a policy image can distort data or exclude other information to fit the narrative it is attempting to portray. Positive policy images uphold stability, whereas negative policy images upset stability. The four main strategies of changing policy images are framing, casual stories, crises or focusing events, and measurement.
● After the Civil War, black people were arrested for small crimes in order to make them work for no pay through a loophole in the 13th Amendment. ● This led to further exploitation of black people and an association of black people with crime ● The reason for the War on Crime was a fear of rising crime rates ● Desegregation and protests of the 1960s made white Americans believe that crime was everywhere ● Crime has been coded with race for a long time using terms like “traditional” and “family values” ● Criminalization was used to stop black people from voting ● Agencies often mistreated black people but were only reprimanded or disbanded if they mistreated white people creating an interest convergence ● Treatment of the opioid epidemic has shown the difference between drug issues that have more black users ● Crack and cocaine disparity despite no proof that crack is more dangerous
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory Applied ● War on Crime and War on Drugs existed in many venues because it was a punctuation ● Crime policy was in equilibrium until Lyndon B Johnson in the 1960s ● It was in punctuation from the 1960s until the early 2000s ● Mass incarceration began out of crime policy and started in the 1970s ● It began to punctuate as crime reached equilibrium in 2010 ● Crime has had many policy images ○ Criminals as immoral people who deserve punishment ○ Career criminals as a few that commit most crimes ○ Expanding criminal justice to provide jobs ○ Criminals need to be in prison to keep the communities safe ○ Nonviolent drug offenders as humans who made mistakes and did no harm ● The audience for crime has always been wide whereas the audience for mass incarceration is small but slowly widening
How CRT and PET help explain policy toward crime and mass incarceration
Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET)
Policy Image
Critical Race Theory Applied
Audience Expansion
Venue Shopping
Expansion of the audience brings new interests and pressure to policy issues that were in a state of equilibrium. Policy images can expand the audience. As an audience widens a policy monopoly or subsystem has a harder time holding onto power. Within a policy monopoly, issues are isolated by technical language and methods, but when it appeals to other audiences through easier understanding and value-based interest it is vulnerable to change. When expanding an audience there are four different audience levels: the identification group, alternative groups, the attentive public, and the general public.
A policy venue is a “institutional location where authoritative decisions are made concerning a given issue.” Our government offers many venues to resolve issues: executive positions, bureaucratic organizations, courts, U.S. Congress, state governments, and congressional committees. PET denies that institutions must cover specific issues and claim that venues change over time. Venue shopping is a tactic that challenges a policy monopoly or subsystems by searching for another venue that may progress an issue. Some venues may be more favorable for action or policy punctuation than previous subsystems.
● Both are frameworks that acknowledge that progression is not a steady path forward but rather something that has to be pushed for against those in power ● Subsystems and white people in power are hesitant to change as it can weaken their positions ● Two policy timelines: crime and mass incarceration ● Blackness and its association with crime made the punctuation of crime easier ● Obama marked a departure from crime policy to mass incarceration policy ● The policy image of nonviolent drug offenders, particularly black ones, as sympathetic has massively changed policy to punctuation ● Humanizing drug offenders sets us on track to humanize more criminals ● Crime and Mass incarceration are linked but separate issues with separate solutions ● There is hope for moving forward through policy images and interest convergence
Unusually long period of punctuation new legislation supporting retribution based justice. Change settled down overtime to equilibrium due to positive policy image that prisons keep dangerous people away.
Punctuation or interruption to the norm in the 1960s due to policy images that depicted Black Americans and cheap drugs as dangerous
Introduction of Mass Incarceration as an issue to be solved and emergence into politics through lessening sentences particularly of non-violent drug offenders