Dayries received what amounts to a life sentence not just for pilfering a sandwich, or even for the violence he allegedly threatened in a follow-up confrontation. The proximate cause of Larry Dayries’s seventy-year sentence was his past. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Dayries has a lengthy criminal record. Prior to walking into that Whole Foods, he’d already been convicted of burglary, armed robbery, and a string of thefts, and he served several prison terms as a result. In short, he was classified as a habitual criminal when he stood before a jury in the District Court of Travis County. In Texas, that’s something you definitely do not want to be. Texas is one of twenty-eight states with what are colloquially known as three-strikes laws, which permit the state to impose tough—some might say draconian—sentences for repeat criminal offenders. The logic here is that if you make a habit of breaking the rules of society, then society is justified in tolerating only so much before it exiles you to a penal institution for an extended period. Possibly for life. The triviality of the offense triggering this sanction is less the issue than a chronic criminal history: A piffling offense to civil order can put you behind bars for a very, very long time if it is preceded by an established pattern of social predation. Even if you vehemently disagree with habitual offender policies and recoil at the injustice of brutal punishments for small-fry infractions, there’s a certain tough-love rationality underpinning this argument.

Or maybe not. Maybe that argument is just cover for more malevolent motivations to deprive select people of their liberty. Dayries did not have just a history of criminal activity, he had an even longer history of mental health struggles and drug addiction.⁴ He is also Black. As a society we sweep disproportionate numbers of all three groups into prison. Roughly two-thirds of people in prison have some sort of substance abuse disorder,⁵ and in some state institutions between 15 to 30 percent of inmates are suffering from some sort of significant mental health issue.⁶ The racial imbalance in prison populations is jaw dropping. Incarceration is a fate that singularly afflicts a single demographic group—Black people, and specifically Black males. Roughly 12 percent of Texas’s population is Black while roughly a third of the people locked up in its prisons are Black, a disparity that scales nationally.⁷ In the United States, the lifetime actuarial probability of being incarcerated is estimated as roughly 30 percent for Black males. It is less than 5 percent for white males.⁸ Dayries, in short, was playing some pretty poor odds when he walked into that Whole Foods and pinched a tuna fish sandwich.

What happened to Larry Dayries, then, is not a simple story of a punishment fitting or not fitting a crime. Tangled up in this narrative are questions of racial justice, public health, crime prevention, society’s tolerance for rule breakers, where and when that sufferance should end, what happens once someone crosses the proverbial line, and much, much more. Dayries is just one subject among millions involuntarily participating in a forty-year experiment whose social, economic, and political impacts we only dimly understand. During that span the United States has deprived its citizens of their liberty at a clip unprecedented not just among liberal democracies, but at a rate calculated to make the most authoritarian regimes blush. In doing so it has created a massive underclass. As of 2010 an estimated 3 percent of the entire US population—15 percent of the Black population—had a prison record. Eight percent of the entire population—and a stunning 33 percent of the Black male population—had a felony record.⁹ A felony conviction imposes constraints on a wide range of economic and social opportunity, and it can even lead to permanent political disenfranchisement, the loss of the basic democratic right to vote. Why? Why did we do this? Why did we become the world’s biggest jailer? And, just as importantly, what has it done to us? How has having the world’s biggest ex-prisoner population shaped us socially, economically, and politically? The object of this book is to seek answers to those questions. It is no easy task. As the case of Larry Dayries amply demonstrates, the system’s severity and head-scratching consequences can readily be pointed out, but its complexity and absurdity can defy description, let alone explanation. Starting an investigation into the causes and consequences of the carceral state with a story of a stolen sandwich makes about as much sense as anything. A more systematic pursuit of answers to the questions at the heart of this book, however, first calls for an analytical map. Picking up that map leads us straight to a jailer with two faces.

THE TWO-FACED JAILER

The United States locks up a greater proportion of its citizens than any other country, and it’s at a rate far above that of comparable liberal democracies. On a per capita basis, the United States incarcerates four times more people than Australia, five times more than the United Kingdom, six times more than Canada, and eight times more than Germany.¹⁰ When it comes to depriving citizens of their liberty, the United States keeps company with the likes of Russia, China, Rwanda, and El Salvador, authoritarian regimes with dubious commitments to human rights and countries with recent histories of violence, civil disorder, and repression. Estimates by the federal government’s official criminal justice ledger jockeys—the Bureau of Justice Statistics—indicate the incarceration rate has been north of 600 inmates per 100,000 for decades. Those are astonishing numbers. By some estimates, by the early part of the twenty-first century something like 1 out of every 100 US residents was sitting in some sort of jail cell.¹¹ The numbers have since declined, but they still outstrip any comparable liberal democracy by a margin large enough to inject a painful irony to America as a self-described “land of the free.” Of course, there’s nothing new here. America’s unprecedented commitment to locking up its own citizens is a familiar tale told countless times by scholars, journalists, politicians, and reform advocates. Here’s the thing, though: That story is wrong.

In reality, the United States, as in the US government, tosses its citizens into the pokey at roughly the same rate as well-known criminal coddlers like Norway, Denmark, and Finland. At any given time in the past few years, there were something like 175,000 people locked up under federal jurisdiction.¹² In a nation of roughly 330 million, that works out to an incarceration rate in the ballpark of 50 inmates per 100,000 population.¹³ Those numbers put the United States somewhere between Japan and Sweden, at the very bottom of World Incarceration League and a very long way from the oft-told tale of America’s imprisonment exceptionalism. So, what’s the story with the numbers? Is America a nation that uses incarceration rarely and judiciously, somewhere in line with the most liberal members of Northern Europe? Or is it a nation of harsh justice and severe punitiveness, herding people into involuntary confinement at rates that would make totalitarians blanche?

These are actually harder questions to answer than you might think. The reason is that unlike many of the countries it is often compared to, the United States does not have a criminal justice system. Instead, it has fifty-one of them: in addition to the federal system, every one of the fifty states operates an independent counterpart, each with its own criminal codes, law enforcement agencies, courts, and prisons. Most important for the purposes of this book, each of those systems is controlled by a sovereign political government with the legal authority to exercise considerable independence in deciding who gets locked up for what and for how long. Those political systems exercise that independence to the full. In America, your liberty—or even your life—may be forfeit not simply because of what you do, but where you do it. If Larry Dayries had run off with a lobster roll from a lunch counter in Maine it’s unlikely that he’d be spending the rest of his life behind bars.

The fact is, we have a two-faced system—technically, you could argue a three-faced system—and the one with the real killer eyes is not the federal government but the governments of the fifty states. The vast majority of people behind bars fall into three distinct buckets. There are those under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, people convicted of federal crimes and serving time in federal institutions. They account for less than 10 percent of the two million–plus people locked up in any given year. A little less than 30 percent are in local jails. Some of these are serving time for misdemeanor offenses, but most—about half a million—have not been convicted of any crime, let alone sentenced for one. They simply couldn’t make bail after an arrest and are just sitting in jail waiting for the system’s gears to grind and figure out what to do with them. That raises its own set of questions about (in)justice, but they are beyond the scope of this book. It is the third category that is the focus here: those held under state jurisdiction in state prisons. They account for roughly 60 percent of all incarcerations in the United States, by some margin the lion’s share of mass incarceration.¹⁴ This is the jailer that swallows whole the likes of Larry Dayries.

Unlike the selective accounting that can be applied to the federal ledgers, there’s no generous fiddling of the numbers that can make things look better at the state level. Collectively, state incarceration rates are roughly eight times higher than federal incarceration rates. Put the states into that World Incarceration League individually and they absolutely dominate the top of the table. While there is some movement among the leaders depending on the year and statistical source consulted, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Mississippi consistently make the top five.¹⁵ Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and a handful of others are not far behind, all peddling hard in the prison population peloton, all capable of making the periodic sprint to the front. In the last ten years—years when prison populations were flat or falling—at least ten states were locking people up at levels that were skating close to 1 percent of their population. It bears re-emphasizing that I’m trying to exclude federal incarcerations and people behind bars in local and county jails from these numbers—I’m looking only at those serving a minimum of a one-year sentence in state institutions. Across four recent decades (1978–2019), the peak annual incarceration rate of those falling into this latter category was 885 per 100,000 population. Louisiana achieved this dubious distinction in 2009.¹⁶ The axiomatic principle of all that follows is that states are the best place to search for answers to why we have become the world’s largest jailer and to understand what taking on that job has done to us socially, economically, and politically.

An important argument for this starting assumption is that while most states tend to have high incarceration rates compared to other countries, compared to each other they are all over the place. Florida locks up people at roughly twice the rate as New Jersey. Texas at roughly three times the rate of Minnesota. Louisiana at roughly four times the rate of Vermont. These relative differences among the states are remarkably stable across time. For more than a century, incarceration rates have tended to change synchronously, in other words, they head up or down at roughly the same time in most states. That suggests there are national forces that drive incarceration rates. Yet there’s virtually no evidence that states have ever, or ever will, lock up people in roughly similar proportions. Pick any time period in the last 120 or so years and the incarceration rates might look very different, but the state rankings in the “World League” look awfully similar.¹⁷ Whatever national-level forces are in play, they cannot explain these huge, persistent state-level variations.

A general sense of the variation in incarceration rates is conveyed in figure 1.1, which summarizes the distribution of annual incarceration rates for each state between 1978 and 2019. This is a boxplot, a type of chart designed to capture a range of summary statistics: (1) the range of values between upper and lower quartiles of the distribution. This range is represented by the “box” associated with each state—the wider the box, the greater the dispersion in incarceration rates over the forty-one-year period covered. (2) The minimum and maximum incarceration rates—these are the values indicated by the ends of the “whiskers” coming out of each box. Dots represent outliers, or data points that are unusually far away from all other values of the distribution and are placed beyond the whiskers. (3) The median, or the value that splits each state’s forty-one annual incarceration rate observations into two equal halves—this is the vertical “stripe” in the middle of each box.

Figure 1.1 clearly shows the huge incarceration rate disparities between states. Between 1978 and 2019 Louisiana’s lowest annual incarceration rate (top line) exceeded the highest incarceration rate recorded in Maine during the same time period. The median values of the highest five states are orders of magnitude higher than the five lowest states. The chart captures not just the variation between states but also within them. Louisiana’s whiskers range from 179 all the way to 885, meaning its highest incarceration rate was about five times more than its lowest. This is why it has a “wide box”—its annual incarceration numbers are not just high, they are widely dispersed. In contrast, Maine’s maximum incarceration rate was “only” twice as high as its minimum, and the range of values involved was much smaller from 51.7 and its highest at 152. Comparatively speaking, Maine is a “narrow box” state, its incarceration rates staying in much smaller range than the wide-box states.

What could explain these huge differences, both in the absolute levels of incarceration and changes in those levels? Differences in crime are an obvious guess, but a large body of scholarship has long since concluded that differences in criminal activity both between and within states is, at best, only a partial explanation.¹⁸ Instead, the differences are argued to be more a product of dissimilarities in institutional setups, socio-demographics, diversity in the will of voters, and the consequences that naturally flow from variation between sovereign political systems. This is all addressed in detail later, but for now the key concept to underline is that the states are not alike. On a wide variety of measures—not just incarceration rates—differences among the states are large, substantive, and meaningful.

DIFFERENCES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE

The United States is a big, complex place and in practice an attempt to explain any element of its political, social, and economic makeup—certainly any causal aspects of its multidimensional criminal justice arrangements—requires ditching a lot of important nuance. That same complexity, however, also has advantages. True, there is no getting around the baffling, fragmented, and balkanized fact of the US political system. It contains overlapping and redundant processes, duplicative institutions, supernumerary decision makers, and bureaucratic choke points, and it routinely marches in different directions under the orders of assorted administrative buttinskis. The governing machinery is not only full of Rube Goldberg gears furiously spinning without actually seeming to drive anything; it is collectively piloted by a confederacy of adversaries. Officers on the bridge and swabs in the engine room not only routinely disagree on direction and speed, they frequently have no consensus on exactly what sort of machine they are operating. Metaphorically, they sit in everything from a rowboat to a spaceship. Dragging systematic comprehension out of all that is not a task for the faint of heart. Yet some of this same complexity also offers a critical explanatory lever. All political systems are confusing in their own way, but the United States uniquely compartmentalizes its confusion in a way that can actually contribute to clarity.

The majority of nation-states have unitary forms of government, political systems where a single, central government holds sovereign power. Regional or local governments—states, counties, whatever—are subordinate to that central government and can do only what the central government lets them. For more than 80 percent of countries on the planet this is the preferred way to run a nation’s political railroad.¹⁹ In contrast, the United States is one of only two dozen or so nation-states to have federal political systems (other examples include Australia, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Canada). This means national and regional governments are co-sovereigns, so the latter have the legal freedom to act independently of the central government in at least some policy arenas. In a federal system, central governments can (and do) try to influence how regional governments exercise their freedom, for example, by offering or withdrawing monetary support. The key thing differentiating a federal from a unitary system, though, is that a regional government can choose not to do what the central government wants it to do. In its constitutionally designated lane, regional government is in the driver’s seat and, at least in theory, can drive as fast or slow as it likes. The United States is unique even among the handful of nations organized along federal lines in the sheer number of such governments it has stuffed into its political system. The fifty states represent close to double the number of sovereign regional governments in any other comparable federally organized nation.²⁰

It’s not just the number of states that’s important, but the fact that they all exercise sovereign power in fact as well as in theory. To be sure, governance in the United States in many major policy areas is a state and federal amalgamation, a programmatic and management mélange making differences hard to discern. States nonetheless exercise real independent power, and what most people—including many scholars of American government—do not fully grasp is that state governments are fundamentally different forms of government than their federal counterpart. The federal government is a limited government, meaning it can exercise only the powers explicitly or implicitly granted to it by the US Constitution. States are very different. Technically they are governments with plenary powers, in other words they are not limited governments.²¹ They do not need to consult the United States’ or their own constitutions to seek legal authority to act. In effect, the federal government has to ask the constitution if it has permission to act. In contrast, the states have to ask if they are specifically prohibited from acting. That’s more than a semantic difference. In 2024, if you sold weed in Colorado, you could have been running a legitimate business in complete compliance with state law. No chance of that next door in Nebraska—there you’d have been violating a range of criminal laws that could have put you behind bars, quite possibly for a very long time. That’s a big difference.

The vast majority of the criminal law in the United States is independently formulated by states using the freedom granted by the Tenth Amendment. Arguments over what the states are free to do without federal interference have been raging for more than two hundred years and with luck will rage on for another two hundred.²² Yet there’s been general agreement from the beginning that dealing with crime is mainly the business of the states. The reason mass incarceration is mostly a phenomenon of the states is in no small part because the states write and enforce the vast majority of criminal law under the authority of their own constitutions. And they have gone about this in very different ways.

The states differ not just in how punitive to make their criminal justice systems. They are different in lots of other ways—geography, geology, topography, and weather are just a handful of examples. Almost by definition these things imply profound differences in how a wide range of policy issues will be prioritized and dealt with. The regulation of marine fisheries, for example, is not much of a concern in landlocked Nebraska. On the other hand, that’s a big deal in Maine. Snow removal is never far from the minds of local government officials during winter in Wisconsin, but it practically never crosses the radar of their counterparts in Florida. All of this makes the states a unique laboratory for analyzing policy and political questions. They represent a large number of sovereign governments who are simultaneously readily comparable—they all must operate within the framework of the US Constitution—while also acting as highly independent policymakers. They differ on a huge variety of dimensions that almost certainly influence how that policymaking independence is exercised. From one perspective, that does indeed create a system that looks complicated, redundant, and spinning off in lots of different directions for lots of different reasons. From an explanatory point of view, though, it’s a gold mine.

Which brings us back to the task at hand of figuring out why we lock so many people up and getting a handle on what that has done to us. One set of differences among the states can be examined to see if they predict other differences. Plenty of scholars have sought to exploit exactly that variance—I’m far from the first to argue that mass incarceration is fundamentally state-level phenomenon that can be best understood by looking at comparative patterns across states.²³ That variation, though, still has much to tell us, the patterns far from comprehensively examined, let alone fully understood. For example, scholars of state politics have long been fascinated with the concept of political culture, the idea that states have their own distinct, self-replicating communal beliefs on what government is and what it should (or should not) be used for. The best-known concept of state-level political culture is the frame-work formulated by political scientist Daniel Elazar in the 1960s. Elazar argued that states have distinct political cultures rooted in the religious and ethnic backgrounds of three distinctive waves of settlement that rolled out across America in more-or-less straight lines from East Coast to West Coast between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.²⁴

The three basic types of political cultures identified by Elazar are moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalistic. Moralistic political cultures spring from the Puritans who settled the Northeast and their Yankee successors who, along with Scandinavians, Germans, and Eastern Europeans, settled across the north and the Great Plains. Reflecting their religiously anchored social origins, moralistic political cultures view government as a means to help build a better society, a vehicle to advance the communal good. Individualistic cultures are anchored in the English, Scottish, Irish, and German settlers who settled such states as New Jersey and Pennsylvania and moved West into Ohio and Indiana. These folks, Elazar argued, had distinctly different civic values than their compatriots to the north. They came to the United States in search of individual opportunity, not to faff around building religious utopias or communally idealized versions of the good society. This gave them a very different orientation to government, which was viewed essentially as an extension of the marketplace. Government was there to either help the individual get ahead or to get the hell out of that individual’s way. Traditionalistic cultures are exclusively Southern and Southwestern, bounded by Virginia and Florida on the East Coast and extending across the nation’s belly to Arizona. Political culture here views government through a lens of tradition, hierarchy, and class divisions; here government exists to defend and maintain the existing social order.

Elazar recognized that states would not necessarily be “pure” versions of these categories—he identified lots of states as mixes—but nonetheless argued that in each state one of these cultures would dominate, its core values institutionally embedded and passed on to succeeding generations who absorbed the civic beliefs and principles they marinated in. Elazar is far from the only scholar to advance an idea of culture as a “sticky” social phenomena, something planted in the communal soil by the ethnic and religious values of a settler population that becomes so rooted it continues to bloom in very different communities generations removed from their historical origins.²⁵ Still, scholars in the 1960s were initially pretty dubious about the validity of Elazar’s concept of political culture, let alone its ability to help explain any meaningful questions about politics and public policy. Elazar’s entire analysis was anchored in impressionistic historicism, mushy stuff to a generation of political scientists who were just starting to take the “science” part of political science seriously.

That changed in 1969 when Ira Sharkansky put numbers on Elazar’s political culture classifications.²⁶ Sharkansky was somewhat skeptical about the notion of state political culture, but nonetheless he argued that if Elazar was right, it should be possible to create a unidimensional, numeric measure of state political culture. Sharkansky did exactly that and then set about seeing whether his spiffy new political culture index could predict anything of interest about politics and government at the state level. It did. Everything from voter turnout to tax effort to the size of state government to the generosity of welfare payments, and much, much more. And these were not piffling relationships. Some of the correlations topped .70 (a correlation ranges from -1.0 to +1.0, so the maximum absolute value is 1.0, and political scientists live in a world where robust correlations half that size precipitate much rehearsing of award acceptance speeches). The demise of Elazarian political culture’s eye-popping explanatory horsepower has been forecast pretty much ever since Sharkansky quantified it. The argument is that as generations pass, mobility increases, and as virtual community replaces the actual thing, the clean edges of Elazar’s classifications will gradually erode until they dissolve entirely in the solution of a nationally (perhaps even globally) homogenized culture. And, fair enough, Sharkansky’s measure doesn’t perform now quite as well as it did fifty years ago.²⁷ Even so, it still does a better job of explaining and predicting political and policy differences among the states than most other options. It is a difference that makes a difference.

With all that in mind, imagine a polity whose culture views a primary job of government as maintaining the social status quo, to protect and defend existing social hierarchy and divisions. A reasonable hypothesis is a government embedded in that culture is going to take a pretty dim view of people who threaten the status quo and its attendant rules and norms. Anyone on the lower end of the social strata who represents a vague or even mostly imagined threat to the existing social order should not expect much in the way of clemency if the jailer catches them hovering around the line of the law. Now imagine a culture where government is seen as a vehicle to improve society, as a means to benefit everyone in the commonweal. Comparatively speaking, is that government more likely to seek penitence rather than punishment from scofflaws, to show a little more clemency to the less privileged who break the rules, and generally be a little less inclined to deprive members of the community of their liberty?

Figure 1.2 puts this hypothesis to the test, showing the relationship between Sharkansky’s quantitative measure of Elazar’s state-level culture and state incarceration rates in 2010. Sharkansky’s scale scores states on a continuous 1 to 9 index, with a 1 indicating a pure moralistic state, a 5 a pure individualistic state, a 9 as a pure traditionalistic state, and numbers in between those anchors represent states with mixed cultures. The pattern is visually pretty obvious. States with traditionalistic cultures have higher incarceration rates, and states with moralistic cultures have lower incarceration rates. In other words, exactly what we’d predict if temporally stable political cultures mapped by Elazar shaped criminal justice policy. That one measure can explain 45 percent—nearly half—of all the variance in 2010 state-level incarceration.²⁸ Again, that’s a difference that makes a difference. And, just to ram the point home, state political culture is almost wholly absent from existing scholarly attempts to explain state-level incarceration rates.²⁹

To anticipate some perfectly legitimate objections, I want to make clear I am not arguing that, end of story, the phenomenon of mass incarceration comes down to a matter of differences in political culture among the states. The key takeaway here is that if the objective is to try to explain why we lock up so many people and to try to understand what that has done to us politically, socially, and economically, the place to look for answers is the states. If we focus on states as the unit of analysis, we’ve got fifty independent governments who bear the primary legal authority to lock people up, who have exercised that power very differently, and also who differ on a lot of other things that might be reasonably expected to predict incarceration. Culture is simply one example of this. The fact that incarceration rates in 2010 can be so accurately predicted by a measure of culture conceived of forty years earlier certainly suggests the latter is capturing something important about the states that is linked to their criminal justice policies. To be sure, it is unlikely that culture alone explains incarceration. The tight culture-incarceration correlation more likely says something about states’ relative receptivity to a larger political and social environment that pushes policymakers in a more punitive direction. More proximate political and social causal drivers might include poverty, ideology, partisan polarization, and, even levels of criminal activity. And, of course, race, which looms large over not just what happened to Larry Dayries but to any investigation of incarceration in the United States. It is all of these differences and more that provide the explanatory leverage for what follows. What else besides culture might predict incarceration? And do so in a way that makes causal sense? These are questions that can be (and have been) directly and empirically attacked using the states in exactly the same way as I just used culture to predict incarceration.

Yes, this is largely a correlational analytical strategy, and yes, appropriate cautions and caveats need to be recognized in drawing causal inferences from such an exercise. Clearly, correlation is not causation. That said, it’s pretty hard to have the latter without the former. And until we can randomly assign states different crime levels, their electorates’ particular attitudes and behaviors, and all the other variables that we’d have to experimentally manipulate to gain real traction on causality, it’s mostly what we’re stuck with. It means we have to proceed carefully and be particularly alert to questions of spuriousness—other explanations that might explain observed correlations—but it is no reason not to move forward at all.

STALKING THE JAILER

Why has the United States, among its liberal democratic contemporaries, engaged upon a decades-long effort to deprive vast numbers of its citizens of their liberty? What are the social, economic, and political implications of taking on the huge logistic and administrative burdens, not to mention the eye-watering expenses, associated with that policy project? Those are big, difficult-to-answer questions—in macro-level metaphorical terms, the aim of this book is nothing less than to understand where the jailer came from and what he has done to us. And as the sad case of Larry Dayries makes all too clear, the motivations, justification, and effects of the jailer are, to put it mildly, head scratching.

Nonetheless a path to getting those answers lies in leveraging exactly what plays a central role in making the underlying issues so complex—the fragmented nature of how America distributes legal authority over its criminal justice operations and organizes its political system. In the states we have not only a large number of comparable governments with enormous independence on matters of criminal justice but also political units with identifiable differences on everything from culture to the weather. Finding systematic patterns between those two broad sets of differences—differences in incarceration and differences in things that reasonably might be expected to cause states to be more or less aggressive in locking up its citizens—provides an analytical tool, a means to go looking for those answers. Still, having a compass and map are not much use if you do not have a destination, or at least a direction. Where do we go looking for explanations? Before we start taking advantage of the analytical possibilities of the states and search for patterns among their differences, it might be a good idea to first have at least a rough idea of what sorts of patterns we should be looking for.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on perspective), we do not have to look far for suggestions. Indeed, if anything, we have a surfeit of theories claiming to explain the phenomenon of mass incarceration, most of which can already call on a raft of state-level scholarly studies to support—or cast doubt on—them. The real challenge is trying to sort through which, if any, are worth their analytical salt. Why are so many people in prison? Well, if we are trying to figure out why we make such profligate use of incarceration, it might be a good idea to first figure out what is incarceration’s social purpose: what are prisons for? The answer to that turns out to be a highly contested subject, and where you come down in this debate points you to very different answers about why we have so many people sitting behind bars.

Thank you for reading this preview of The Jailer’s Reckoning!

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Figure 1.1.

Distribution of Incarceration Rates
by State 1978–2019