Abstract
Has the striking cost of mass incarceration finally loosened the political chains that have made the United States the world’s leader in incarceration? In Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment, Hadar Aviram tackles this question. This timely analysis of changes in correctional policy and practice argues that the recession opened a new politically feasible course away from costly levels of imprisonment. The book rightly casts a realistic and pessimistic shadow over what shape these reforms might take and their long-term implications for justice and equality. It highlights the inherent pitfalls in reforms grounded exclusively in fiscal concerns and points to troubling recent trends such as greater reliance on private prisons, private probation, and “pay to stay” jails.
Aviram coins the term “humonitarianism” to describe how practical concerns about the mounting costs of America’s experiment with mass incarceration increasingly permeate correctional discourse. Humonitarianism focuses on the “cost-centered logic behind non-punitive reforms” (p.4). The phrase reflects the book’s framing of current reforms as part of a broader neoliberal culture where cost calculations and concerns over the size of the state subsume humanitarian concerns about justice and mass incarceration’s consequences for inmates and their families. The book argues that America’s correctional system has been transformed by this increasingly dominant discourse (and its associated products) and that recent declines in prison populations mark a transformation from the tough-on-crime era to one dominated by concerns about costs.
This argument must overcome a couple of challenging facts. First, it is as yet unclear whether American punishment has really been transformed or whether recessionary challenges forced a limited retrenchment in mass incarceration. Second, the relative importance of fiscal concerns and the importance of the 2008 recession and its aftermath in shaping recent declines in imprisonment are unclear—state and national incarceration rates slowed and even began to decline well before 2008, and, as the book notes, many of the policy changes that drove these declines were only partially linked to monetary concerns. To build a stronger argument that American punishment is undergoing a transformation, Aviram points to state drug law reforms that legalize marijuana and to recent trends away from the death penalty in states where this once seemed unlikely. As the book correctly notes, these trends were unthinkable in the 1980s and ‘90s when drugs were demonized and states ramped up their efforts to kill offenders. The book’s focus on the ways drug reform and changes in capital punishment have been couched in humonitarian discourse is convincing, but this focus comes at the expense of a more detailed examination of probation and parole, two other key sites of correctional reform.
The book grapples with the timing of decarceration by appropriately embedding humonitarianism within a broader constellation of forces that have unsettled the war on crime’s overwhelming political momentum that dominated previous decades. In this, the book provides an insightful angle for better understanding the shifting rhetorical and lawmaking currents that provide new openings between fiscal conservatives and reformers whose goals are value-focused. As Aviram notes, humonitarianism provides some of the only political cover and common ground on criminal justice policy that these groups have shared, regardless of their motivations, opening new windows of cooperation and compromise.
For scholars familiar with the incarceration literature, the chapter “The New Carceral Wheeling and Dealing,” which addresses the growing reliance on private prisons, private probation, and pay-to-stay jails, is particularly insightful. Aviram synthesizes media accounts and existing scholarship into a tight and illuminating picture of how some states have responded to fiscal austerity by outsourcing the state’s justice functions to profit-driven entities. Private prisons have always been an interesting angle for understanding incarceration, but their relative significance compared to state and federal facilities had generally been marginal. As Aviram highlights, this is changing; and, ironically, state lawmakers justify contracts with for-profit groups as cost-saving measures, even though these companies’ successes are more attributable to their large and sophisticated lobbying operations and campaign contributions at the state and national level. As she notes, many private prison companies profit from imprisoning the healthiest, least dangerous offenders. Aviram provides a thoroughly national account that integrates a complex discussion of probation and parole as well as prisons and shines a useful light on austerity’s consequences for offenders.
Aviram deploys humonitarianism to grapple with a theoretical puzzle central to the book: many punishment theories suggest that punishment should become harsher during periods of economic decline, but the opposite seems to be occurring in the United States in the wake of the Great Recession. What should we make of this seemingly contradictory outcome? No single book is likely to resolve this issue, but by embedding the book’s analysis within the broader national discourse over costs, Aviram’s work suggests that a half-century of massive state expansion and bureaucracy might have finally reached a threshold that is less palatable to a growing proportion of Americans. The prolonged decline and stability of lower serious violent crime rates might have provided a tailwind for the growing chorus of more conservative voices concerned about the size and cost of the state.
Like all books, Cheap on Crime has some important limitations. First, it leans far more on examples from California than from the rest of the nation, even though California’s course to decarceration seems somewhat unique—federal courts forced lawmakers to reduce its prison population, which they resisted to the bitter end. Probably the most fitting example of recent criminal justice reform in California is the passage of Proposition 36, which revised California’s notorious “Three Strikes” law. But, as Aviram notes, campaign organizers “consciously chose not to focus on the humonitarian argument” in pushing its overwhelming passage. Instead, the proposition’s passage reflected a broad coalition, including key actors within law enforcement and political elites, whose support was buttressed by widespread endorsements from major media outlets.
This points to another issue that some sociology of punishment scholars might find troublesome. The book does not effectively address factors that have emerged from the growing body of state-level research on penal change even though it is within those sites where the majority of the rhetorical changes that the book focuses on have occurred. This research has convincingly illustrated how penal change reflects broader social and political conflicts within local contexts where actors and interest groups struggle to shape punishment. State institutional arrangements and political dynamics play an important role in shaping the penal playing field, and this context helps give meaning to the rhetoric on cost central to this book. Without a more contextualized and historicized account of how and where these rhetorical changes are occurring, the reader is sometimes forced to accept their emergence and significance as fact. Concerns about punishment’s costs certainly are not new—many politicians only reluctantly embraced prison expansion in the 1980s due to their commitment to fiscal conservatism. But powerful and well-organized groups effectively negated those concerns by citing and driving fear of crime. We can hope future scholarship can do more to help untangle how and why concerns about cost gained traction within specific contexts.
These points aside, the book provides an insightful account of how fiscal conservatism’s resurgence has facilitated new political currents around correctional policy. Only time will tell whether humonitarian discourse will continue to play an important role in shaping penal change in the United States now that most state budgets have begun to stabilize. Either way, Aviram’s account provides useful insights into the fissures generated by the fiscal crisis and their potential to generate new political dynamics that might reverse the nation’s penal indulgence.