‘The better way to fight crime’: Why fiscal arguments do not restrain the carceral state
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Author | Daniel HoSang,Sarah Cate |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617690801 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
690801TCR0010.1177/1362480617690801Cate and HoSang Theoretical CriminologyCate and HoSang
research-article2017
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(2) 169 –188
‘The better way to fight
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crime’: Why fiscal arguments
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480617690801
DOI: 10.1177/1362480617690801
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do not restrain the carceral
state
Sarah Cate
University of Southern Mississippi, USA
Daniel HoSang
University of Oregon, USA
Abstract
In recent years, actors from across the political spectrum concerned about the
expansion of the US carceral state have pointed to the fiscal impacts of incarceration
in a time of public austerity. A new regime of public policies pledging to be ‘smart on
crime’ has taken root as a result. Advocates of such policies operate on the assumption
that fiscal arguments will shift the trajectory of prison expansion because commitments
to austerity will override the costly ‘tough on crime’ regime that has driven prison
expansion in the USA over the last 40 years. This article reverses this assumption
through a consideration of state-level policy in Oregon, a state that has formally
embraced a commitment to fiscal restraint and ‘justice reinvestment’ as a strategy to
limit prison growth. Our historical analysis reveals that since statehood, commitments
to austerity and taxpayer protection have always framed criminal justice policy debates.
Understood from this perspective, the story is not that prison reform advocates have
discovered a new framework (‘smart on crime’) to restrain prison growth. It is that
the longstanding discourse and politics of fiscal austerity has come to incorporate and
Corresponding authors:
Sarah Cate, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Southern Mississippi, 118
College Drive, #5108, Hattiesburg, MS 39406, USA.
Email: sarah.cate@usm.edu
Daniel HoSang, Associate Professor, Departments of Ethnic Studies and Political Science, University of
Oregon, 1284 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1284, USA.
Email: dhosang@uoregon.edu
170
Theoretical Criminology 22(2)
absorb a portion of the anti-prison movement itself. That is fiscal arguments for prison
reform are fully commensurate with the logic that drove mass incarceration in the first
place. As a result, the state’s prison population has continued to expand even in the
era of ‘smart on crime’ policymaking because commitments to fiscal austerity have not
fundamentally challenged the policies and discourses that fueled the initial prison boom
in the state. As most prisoners in the USA continue to be confined in state institutions,
the analysis of state-level policy development in this article offers important insights into
ongoing political debates over decarceration.
Keywords
Criminal justice, discourse, history, penal reform, public policy
In the last decade, renewed scholarly and public attention has focused on the politics of
decarceration—the conditions, policies and politics that facilitate or restrain a reduction
in the prison population and the authority of the carceral state (Bosworth, 2011; Doob
and Webster, 2014; Garland et al., 2014; Gartner et al., 2011; Gottschalk, 2010; Jacobs,
2007; Miller, 2014; Spencer and Petersilia, 2013; Thompson, 2011). One central focus of
this debate has been the relationship between fiscal austerity and carceral policy.
Austerity has become a potent material and discursive force in shaping debates about
incarceration, criminality and the role of the state. Unlikely coalitions of liberals and
conservatives have formed in many states with a shared focus on limiting the fiscal
demands of the carceral state. Hadar Aviram (2015: 11) has coined the term ‘humonetari-
anism’ to define ‘a set of rhetorical arguments, political strategies, correctional policies,
and cultural perceptions that focuses on cost-saving and financial prudence as its raison
d’être’. But this discourse has had contradictory effects. On the one hand, these claims
have expanded public and political attention to the financial consequences of a criminal
justice system that still keeps more than seven million people under its control. On the
other hand, scholars such as Aviram, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2015), Marie Gottschalk
(2007), and others have called for sober assessments of the capacity of this politics and
discourse to significantly reduce incarceration rates and the reach of the carceral state.
This article uses the case of Oregon, a state that has seen large increases in its prison
population and corrections expenditures during the last 20 years to consider the relation-
ship between fiscal crisis, prisons, and the role of the state. In 2012, Oregon ranked third
among states in the proportion of its unrestricted general fund devoted to corrections, a
rate nearly twice the national average (National Association of State Budget Officers,
2012). Examining state-level corrections policy is critical because the majority of prison-
ers in the United States continue to be sentenced and confined within state prison systems,
and states serve as important policy laboratories for corrections policy experimentation.
Like other states, Oregon has experienced both a ‘tough on crime’ policy-making period
characterized by stricter sentencing guidelines and a significant expansion of the state
prison system as well as a more recent ‘smart on crime’ period characterized by modest
sentencing reform and a greater concern about the fiscal impact of incarceration.
Cate and HoSang
171
We argue against the prevailing assumption that liberal prison reformers adopted the
‘new’ language of fiscal austerity as a tactic to curb prison expansion. Our historical
analysis of discursive and institutional changes and continuities over time demonstrates
that in Oregon, the politics of incarceration have always been grounded in claims about
austerity and efforts to expand or limit state power. In many ways, it is liberal reformers
who have been incorporated into this longstanding discourse. Recent appeals to fiscal
restraint by policy makers and advocates to reduce the prison population have thus far
had limited impact. Even as ‘smart on crime’ has replaced ‘tough on crime’ as the domi-
nant framework through which such debates take place, the state’s prison population has
continued to expand, largely because it has not disrupted the constellation of policies and
discourses that fueled the growth in the prison population during the last two decades.
We consider how both the ‘tough on crime’ and ‘smart on crime’ frameworks operate
within a common ideological field, and thus share and naturalize a particular set of sub-
ject positions.
Theoretical contributions and method
Individual state-level analyses illustrate the particular institutional opportunities and
constraints that explain state-level variations in incarceration rates and practices (Barker,
2009; Lynch, 2010; McLennan, 2008; Neill et al., 2014; Perkinson, 2010; Zimring and
Hawkins, 1991). The constellation of policies making up ‘penal transformations’ are
‘deeply tied to locale and to history’ (Lynch, 2010: 216). This article contributes to an
important shift in the research on incarceration from the grand narratives of the US puni-
tive turn, which focus on national trends, to geographically specific examinations of the
development of carceral policies (Page, 2011). Oregon’s particular conditions and policy
developments highlight important aspects of carceral intransigence at the state level.
There are several conditions that have shaped the terrain of prison expansion in
Oregon that make it distinct from other regions, such as the Sunbelt, the South, and the
Northeast (Campbell, 2016; Lynch, 2010; McLennan, 2008; Perkinson, 2010). These
conditions include differences in the timing and periodization of prison expansion, the
racial and ethnic demographics of the state, longstanding commitments to rehabilitation
rather than ‘toughness’ within corrections policy, and the particular types of policies that
have been implemented. In addition, because nearly all of these policy decisions have
taken place through statewide ballot initiatives and referenda rather than in legislative
debates or judicial proceedings, Oregon offers an important example about the ways in
which the voter and the ‘taxpayer’ have been constructed within and through debates
about crime and incarceration.
With regards to method and evidence, we draw from multiple analytic conventions
and traditions. The first part of the article uses a historical institutionalist framework by
examining the particular conditions that constrained the growth of prisons in Oregon
between 1859 and the early 1990s (Pierson and Skocpol, 2002). The second part of the
article, grounded in a discursive institutional analysis, analyzes the state’s dramatic pivot
toward carceral expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, examining the strategies, subject
positions, and policy proposals of the political actors that sought to influence these
debates (Hay, 2006; Schmidt, 2008, 2012). This analysis includes an in-depth newspaper
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Theoretical Criminology 22(2)
examination of coverage in The (Portland) Oregonian of the select crime policy ballot
initiatives from 1994 to 2008. Additionally, we analyze voter pamphlets, political adver-
tisements, and communications and policy documents from both prison expansion...
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