Wisconsin Sentencing in the Tough-on-Crime Era: How Judges Retained Power and Why Mass Incarceration Happened Anyway [Hardcover]

The dramatic increase in U.S. prison populations since the 1970s is often blamed on the mandatory sentencing required by three strikes laws and other punitive crime bills. Michael O'Hear shows that the blame is actually not so easily assigned. His meticulous analysis of incarceration in Wisconsina state where judges have considerable discretion in sentencingexplores the reasons why the prison population has ballooned nearly tenfold over the past forty years.

O'Hear tracks the effects of sentencing laws and politics in Wisconsin from the eve of the imprisonment boom in 1970 up to the 2010s. Drawing on archival research, original public-opinion polling, and interviews with dozens of key policymakers, he reveals important dimensions that have been missed by others. He draws out lessons from the Wisconsin experience for the United States as a whole, where mass incarceration has cost taxpayers billions of dollars and caused untold misery to millions of inmates and their families.

The dramatic increase in U.S. prison populations since the 1970s is often blamed on mandatory sentencing laws, but this case study of a state with judicial discretion in sentencing reveals that other significant factors influence high incarceration rates.

Serious students of modern sentencing reformsas well as everyone eager to understand the roots of, and potential responses to, modern mass incarcerationmust have this book on their reading list. O'Hear thoroughly canvasses the dynamic story of Wisconsin's uniquely important sentencing reform history. Douglas Berman, author of the Sentencing Law and Policy Blog Douglas Berman,author of theSentencing Law and Policy Blog

Fascinating political and social history. O'Hear puts national criminal justice trends into a single-state frame, providing much sharper insights than often come from trying to look at the entirety of this very big country. This is first-rate work. Frank O. Bowmal³l