The Jailer’s Reckoning

CHAPTER ONE NOTES

1. The details of Larry Dayries crime, arrest, and sentencing are drawn from multiple sources. See, especially: Hannaford, Alex. “No Exit.” Texas Observer, October 3, 2016, https://www.texasobserver.org/three-strikes-law-no-exit/, and Larry Dayries, Appellant v. The State of Texas, Appellee, NO. 03-10-100704-CR (August 30, 2011), https://law.justia.com/cases/texas/third-court-of-appeals/2011/20503.html. At the time of writing, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice projected his release date as February 6, 2080, and his earliest parole eligibility date as February 7, 2040, https://offender.tdcj.texas.gov/OffenderSearch/start.action.

2. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2020. “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2017–2018.” US Department of Justice, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus1718.pdf. The 200,000 number quoted in the text refers to adults in prison or local jails, which in Texas in 2018 was reported as 218,000. The total number being supervised by the Texas system, that is, including people on probation or parole, is much higher—672,400 in 2018.

3. The Vera Institute. “The Price of Prisons: Prison Spending in 2015,” https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends-prison-spending.

4. Hannaford, “No Exit.”

5. NIDA. June 1, 2020. Criminal Justice Drug Facts, https://www.drugabuse.gov/

6. Steadman, H. J., F. C. Osher, P. C. Robbins et al. 2009. Prevalence of Serious Mental Illness among Jail Inmates. Psychiatric Services, 60, 761–65.

7. Texas Department of Criminal Justice FY 2017 Statistical Report, https://www.tdcj.texas.gov/documents/Statistical_Report_FY2017.pdf, page 1.

8. Bonczar, Thomas, and Allen Beck. 1997. “Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison.” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, NCJ-160092.

9. Shannon, S. K., C. Uggen, J. Schnittker, M. Thompson, S. Wakefield, and M. Massoglia. 2017. The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People with Felony Records in the United States, 1948–2010. Demography, 54(5), 1795–1818.

10. World Prison Brief, Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research. 2020. “Highest to Lowest—Prison Population Rate,” https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All.

11. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Key Statistics. “Estimated Number of Inmates Held in Local Jails or Under the Jurisdiction of State or Federal Prisons and Incarceration Rate, 1980–2016,” https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=kfdetail&iid=493.

12. Carson, E. Ann. 2020. “Prisoners in 2019.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, October 22, 2020, https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=7106.

13. Carson, “Prisoners in 2019.”

14. Sawyer, Wendy, and Peter Wagner. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020.” Sawyer, Wendy, and Peter Wagner. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020.” Technically Washington, D.C. may count as a small fourth bucket. It runs what are the equivalent of local jails, but its prison population has effectively been integrated into the Federal Bureau of Prisons since 2001.

15. Throughout the book I’ve tried to cite specific sources for data and draw heavily from official sources such as the federal government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. In terms of state incarceration rates, I specifically focus on inmates serving sentences of more than twelve months who are under the jurisdiction of state governments. See methodological appendix on the book’s website for details: rowman.com/ISBN/9781538192382.

16. Carson, E. Ann, and Joseph Mulako-Wangota. Bureau of Justice Statistics. “Imprisonment Rates of Total Jurisdiction.” Generated using the Corrections Statisti-cal Analysis Tool (CSAT). Data was generated for 1978 to 2018, using total population under jurisdiction of state institutions at year-end.

17. Schneider, A. L. 2012. Punishment Policy in the American States from 1890 to 2008: Convergence, Divergence, Synchronous Change, and Feed‐Forward Effects. Policy Studies Journal, 40(2), 193–210.

18. Crime and incarceration are most definitely related—after all, to be incarcerated you first have to be convicted of a crime. The issue has more to do with whether the massive increase in state-level incarceration was driven by some equally massive crime wave that occurred between the late 1970s and mid-1990s. Scholars have gen-erally argued that the answer to that seems to be no. While the research literature is not definitive, a general takeaway is that crime—especially violent crime—is predictive of incarceration levels, changes in crime during that period can at best account for only a small portion—perhaps as little as 12 percent—of the huge growth in state prison populations from 1980 to the mid-1990s. A good review of the relevant literature can be found in Pfaff, J. F. 2007. “The Empirics of Prison Growth: A Critical Review and Path Forward.” J. Crim. L. & Criminology, 98, 547.

19. According to Wikipedia, 166 of the 193 member states of the United Nations have unitary systems of government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_state.

20. In comparison Brazil has 26 states, India 29, Mexico 32, and Canada 10.

21. For a book-length treatment of these issues, see: Tarr, Alan. 1998. Understanding State Constitutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

22. In all its full civics class glory, the Tenth Amendment states that, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

23. For examples see:

Hawkins, Darrell, and Kenneth Hardy. 1989. “Black-White Imprisonment Rates: A State-by-State Analysis.” Social Justice, 16(4) (38), 75–94.

Enns, Peter K. 2014. “The Public’s Increasing Punitiveness and Its Influence on Mass Incarceration in the United States.” American Journal of Political Science, 58(4), 857–72.

Enns, Peter K. 2014. “The Public’s Increasing Punitiveness and Its Influence on Mass Incarceration in the United States.” American Journal of Political Science, 58(4), 857–72.

24. Elazar, Daniel. 1966. American Federalism: A View from the States. New York: Cromwell.

25. A more recent but very similar sort of argument to Elazar’s can be found in David Hacker’s work. See, Hacker, David. 1989. Albion’s Seed. New York: Oxford University Press. The political scientist who has done the most to advance and update the Elazar/Sharkansky culture argument is Joel Lieske, who has drilled down to the county level to examine regional subcultures anchored in race, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. Lieske’s updated measures of political culture, at least in some areas, outperform Elazar’s (see Lieske, Joel. 2012. “American State Cultures: Testing a New Measure and Theory.” Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 42, 108–33). Others seem to have stumbled on the same basic concept of state culture without realizing its deep academic roots. An article, in of all places, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents a measure of “tight” state cultures characterized by strongly enforced rules and norms and “loose” cultures with higher levels of tolerance. Their quantitative measure is impressive for the sheer number of inputs it is built from, but statistically speaking it turns out to be something very close to Sharkansky’s fifty-year-old measure (Harrington, Jesse, and Michele Gelfand. 2014. “Tightness-Looseness across the 50 United States.” Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(22), 7990–95). Neither Elazar, Sharkansky, nor Lieske are cited in this study.

26. Sharkansky, Ira. 1969. The Utility of Elazar’s Political Culture: A Research Note. Polity, 2(1), 66–83.

27. See Lieske, “American State Cultures: Testing a New Measure and Theory.”

28. The bivariate correlation between incarceration rates and state culture in 2010 is .67, in other words, the R2 or explained variance = .67 X .67 ~45%.

29. For example, Greenberg and West undertook a widely cited review of the range of explanations of growth in state prison populations and explicitly considered culture as an important explanatory variable. Yet their cultural focus is mostly about the South being different (a reasonable enough argument). Elazar and Sharkansky are not cited at all in their review. See: Greenberg, D. F., and V. West. 2001. State Prison Populations and Their Growth, 1971–1991. Criminology, 39(3), 615–54. Similarly, the National Research Council’s 2014 doorstopper of a review on the causes of incarceration growth never really addresses the concept of state culture, let alone cites Elazar or Sharkansky. See: Travis, J., B. Western, and F. S. Redburn (eds.). 2014. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.