Explore the vast range of titles available.

This study examines why the public supports the punishment of rule breakers. It does so within the context of a recently enacted California initiative mandating life in prison for repeat felons (the \"three strikes\" law). Antecedents of three aspects of people's reactions to rule breakers are explored: (1) support for the three strikes initiative, (2) support for punitiveness in dealing with rule breakers, and (3) willingness to abandon procedural protections when dealing with potential rule breakers. The results of interviews with members of the public suggest that the widely held view that public punitiveness develops primarily from concerns about crime and the courts and is primarily linked to public views about risk and dangerousness is incorrect. While these factors do influence public feelings, they are not the central reasons underlying public punitiveness. Instead, the source of people's concerns lies primarily in their evaluations of social conditions, including the decline in morality and discipline within the family and increases in the diversity of society. These concerns are about issues of moral cohesion-with people feeling that the quality and extent of social bonds and social consensus has deteriorated in American society.

During the past few decades, punitive crime policies have led to explosive growth in the United States prison population. Such policies have contributed to unprecedented incarceration rates for Blacks in particular. In this article, we consider an unexamined relationship between racial disparities and policy reform. Rather than treating racial disparities as an outcome to be measured, we exposed people to real and extreme racial disparities and observed how this drove their support for harsh criminal-justice policies. In two experiments, we manipulated the racial composition of prisons: When the penal institution was represented as \"more Black,\" people were more concerned about crime and expressed greater acceptance of punitive policies than when the penal institution was represented as \"less Black.\" Exposure to extreme racial disparities, then, can lead people to support the very policies that produce those disparities, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle.

Numerous studies have investigated the diffusion of public policies, often focusing on the ways in which learning among governments influences that process. We know relatively little, however, about those policies that diffuse very rapidly, rather than in the familiar S-shaped distribution associated with policy learning, or about what causes variation in temporal diffusion patterns. This study focuses on policy characteristics as a way to develop a priori expectations about the diffusion patterns of public policies. It argues that the salience and complexity of an issue condition lawmakers’ willingness to discount long-term consequences in favor of short-term electoral gain and, thus, to forgo policy learning in favor of immediate adoption. It tests those expectations in an analysis of 57 previously studied policies that diffused between 1850 and 2001 and finds evidence that salience increases the likelihood of rapid diffusion, particularly in noncomplex policies. The paper also explores the causal mechanisms behind these empirical findings in a case study of two policy adoption decisions in California.

Making the length of a prison sentence conditional upon an individual's offence history is shown to be a powerful way of preventing crime. Under a law adopted in the Netherlands in 2001, prolific offenders could be sentenced to a prison term that was approximately 10 times longer than usual. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in application of the law across 31 cities to identify the effect on crime. We find the sentence enhancements to have reduced the rate of theft by 25%. The size of the crime-reducing effect is found to be subject to diminishing returns.

Despite many important recent advances in the study of policy diffusion, this research has devoted limited attention to what happens after the adoption decision. This article attempts to fill this gap in diffusion research by examining the adoption and subsequent modification of \"Three Strikes and You're Out\" laws in the American states. Its analysis suggests that distinct political forces affected state-level outcomes at these two stages of the policymaking process. The rapid spread of Three Strikes laws in the 1990s seems to have occurred because states with more conservative leanings and higher proportions of African-American residents gravitated to a salient and visible policy. In contrast, the modification of Three Strikes laws appears to have been encouraged by financial necessity and shifting ideological environments but hindered by the mobilization of stakeholders with an interest in preserving the status quo, including private prison operators and prison officer unions. The contrast illustrates the usefulness of treating policy diffusion as a multistage process, and the stakeholder mobilization results provide empirical support for recent theorizing about policy feedback effects.

We take advantage of the fortuitous randomization of trial outcome to provide a novel strategy to identify the deterrent effect exclusive of incapacitation. We compare the post-sentencing criminal activity of criminals who were convicted of a strikeable offense with those who were tried for a strikeable offense but convicted of a nonstrikeable offense. As a robustness check, we also make this comparison in states without three-strikes laws. The identification strategy lets us estimate the deterrent effect nonparametrically using data solely from the three-strikes era. We find that California’s three-strike legislation significantly reduces felony arrest rates among the class of criminals with two strikes by 17–20 percent.

California's \"three strikes and you're out\" law is the most notorious example of the wave of mandatory sentencing policies that many states enacted beginning in the late 1970s. While advocates and critics predicted the law would have profound effects on aggregate punishment trends and individual case outcomes, Feeley and Kamin's analysis of previous sentencing reforms suggested the law's impact would be mainly symbolic because local officials would ignore, subvert, or nullify its major provisions. While aggregate analyses have tended to confirm this argument, so far there has been no systematic test of the law's effect on individual cases. This analysis uses multilevel models applied to case-level data from 12 urban California counties to test hypotheses about shifts in average punitiveness, the relative influence of legal and extralegal factors on sentencing, and the uncertainty of sentencing outcomes. Results mostly support Feeley and Kamin's symbolic interpretation, but also reveal important substantive impacts: since Three Strikes, sentences have become harsher, particularly in politically conservative counties, and black felons receive longer prison sentences.

While most states are considering reducing the impact of mass incarceration in their prison systems, few states have faced a larger challenge than California, and few states have reduced their convict and parole population as much as California. Federal court intervention and a series of legislative and voter-initiated reforms in California have changed the landscape in one of the nation's largest criminal justice systems. This article draws on a variety of data sources to explore a potentially historic moment in the quest to end mass incarceration; it remains to be seen whether the public debate over appropriate punishments changed among criminal justice interest groups, such as corrections officers, law enforcement, prosecutors, the judiciary, victim advocates, and liberal and conservative spokespersons. Has the fear of crime among the citizenry changed, and has the public embraced a different response to lawbreakers? There have been important law changes that reduce some felonies to lesser crimes and incentives to punish offenders in local corrections rather than state prisons (known as Realignment), but genuine reductions in mass incarceration will require even more actions. Based on my review of California trends in crime, punishment, and public opinion, I argue that even while there will likely be more progress in decriminalizing drug crimes and other nonviolent crimes, public attitudes toward more serious offenders will be decisive in forecasting the future of mass imprisonment and the California prison gulag. At present, California is pursuing an incremental approach to reducing the numbers in prison for very serious crimes. Reform of prisons is likely to consist of small bites of change in sentencing and parole policies.

The question of how societies should respond to their most serious crimes if not with the death penalty is 'perhaps the oldest of all the issues raised by the two-century struggle in western civilization to end the death penalty' (Bedau, 1990: 481). In this article we draw attention to the rapid and extraordinary increase in the use of 'life imprisonment without parole' in the United States. We aim to critically assess the main arguments put forward by supporters of whole life imprisonment as a punishment provided by law to replace the death penalty and argue against life-long detention as the ultimate sanction.

Objectives. This article investigates the extent to which contextual and individual factors influence the length of prison sentences in California. Methods. The analysis applies a hierarchical linear model to individual and county-level data. Results. Some characteristics of the racial, organizational, and public safety environments are found to influence the length of prison terms. Conclusions. The findings support the organizational maintenance perspective and the idea of minority incarceration as a response to a perceived crime threat. Political environment is not found to have a significant effect on sentence lengths, and the findings do not support the racial threat hypothesis. The effects of contextual factors are more modest than those of individual attributes, including legally relevant variables, such as offense severity, prior record, parole status, and three strikes eligibility. African-American and younger offenders receive longer sentences, but this effect is not found for Latinos. Substantive, methodological, and policy implications are discussed.