Ending Mass Incarceration: Why it Persists and How to Achieve Meaningful Reform [Hardcover]

Ending Mass Incarcerationexplores why mass incarceration is a failed public safety strategy and what should be done to bring about truly transformative change. Although policymakers on both the left and right now recognize mass incarceration as a problem rather than a solution, and many states have taken steps to reduce prison populations, the criminal legal response to crime is harsher than ever. This book identifies three key dynamics that are bolstering mass incarceration. It also identifies three broad changes that would limit the power and reach of the criminal legal system while also addressing the social problems to which it is a misguided response.Why mass incarceration endures in the face of reforms, and how to truly change America's vast criminal justice systemCritics on both the left and the right increasingly use the term mass incarceration to call attention to the unprecedented scale and inequities of the U.S. criminal legal system, and the havoc it wreaks. But even as lawmakers begin to embrace criminal justice reform, the criminal legal response to crime is harsher than ever.In this book, Katherine Beckett explains how and why mass incarceration persists despite growing recognition of its many failures, plummeting crime rates, and widespread efforts by state legislators and others to reduce prison populations. Beckett identifies three primary forces sustaining incarceration rates in this country: political dynamics around violence, resistance to criminal legal system reform in suburban and rural counties, and the failure of popular drug policy reforms to reduce the reach of the criminal legal system. Most reform efforts to date have limited themselves in ways that are politically palatable but do little to curb key drivers of mass incarceration.Beckett then turns to the question of how we can meaningfully decrease the size of the criminal justice system when so many reforms have failed. Drawing on extensive research, she arl£$