Making Punishment Pay

The Political Economy of Revenue, Race, and Regime in the California Prison Boom

Bibliographic Data

ID2135477
AuthorsJ Hagan (0000-0002-4262-9822, American Bar Foundation), Gabriele Plickert (American Bar Foundation), Alberto Palloni (0000-0002-2263-2207, University of Wisconsin–Madison), Spencer Headworth (0000-0003-0075-370X, American Bar Foundation)
Year2015
Volume12
Issue1
Pages95-118
Publication date2015-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueDu Bois Review Social Science Research on Race (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1742-058X • E-ISSN: 1742-0598
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1742058x14000356
PMID30210575
OpenAlexW2127912580
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited37

Sociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative and quantitative data from California, circa 1960-2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging of debt overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment and resistance to paying taxes for building prisons. The leveraging of bond debt deferred and externalized the costs of building prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged and extended this debt and dispensed with the requirement for direct voter approval. A Republican-dominated punishment regime capitalized debt to build prisons in selected exurban Republican California counties with growing visible minority populations. We demonstrate that the innovative use of lease revenue bonds was the essential element that enlarged and extended funding of California prison construction by an order of magnitude that made this expansion a boom. With what Robert Merton called the consequences of imperious interest, this prison expansion enabled the imprisonment of an inordinately large and racially disproportionate inmate population

Bond · Boom · Criminology · Debt · Economics · Imprisonment · Lease · Mass incarceration · Political science · Population · Prison · Punishment (psychology · Revenue · Revenue bond · Sociology · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Engineering · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Homelessness and Social Issues · Psychology · Social Psychology · Finance

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