The ‘Great Decarceration’: Historical Trends and Future Possibilities
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12377 |
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 3. September 2020 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12377
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 261–285
The ‘Great Decarceration’: Historical
Trends and Future Possibilities
PAMELA COX and BARRY GODFREY
Pamela Cox is Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Essex; Barry
Godfrey is Professor of Social Justice, University of Liverpool
Abstract: During the 19th Century, hundreds of thousands of people were caught up in
what Foucault famously referred to as the ‘great confinement’, or ‘great incarceration’,
spanning reformatories, prisons, asylums, and more. Levels of institutional incarceration
increased dramatically across many parts of Europe and the wider world through the
expansion of provision for those defined as socially marginal, deviant, or destitute. While
this trend has been the focus of many historical studies, much less attention has been paid
to the dynamics of ‘the great decarceration’ that followed for much of the early- to mid-
20th Century. This article opens with an overview of these early decarceration trends in
the English adult and youth justice systems and suggests why these came to an end from the
1940s onwards. It then explores parallels with marked decarcerationtrends today, notably
in youth justice, and suggests how these might be expedited, extended, and protected.
Keywords: crime history; decarceration; prison; youth
From the mid-19th Century on, carceral and semi-carceral institutions of
many different types proliferated in England and Wales: local and convict
prisons; asylums; reform and industrial schools; workhouses; and more.
The rise of these and other institutions was shaped by the ‘great confine-
ment’ or ‘great incarceration’, a bureaucratic spatial practice that spread
in different forms across Europe, European empires, and North America
(Foucault 1977). Imprisonment has its historians, and the high rate of in-
carceration in the Anglophone world today has its critics (Christie 2000;
Pratt 2007; Simon 2014; Sparks, Loader and Dzur 2016; Waquant 2010).
Equally, advocates of prison abolition have made persuasive arguments
(Carlen 1990; Ruggiero 2010; Ryan and Sim 2007), and although some
studies have looked back to the mid- to late- 20th Century,few have drawn
evidence from a longer historical frame.
The term ‘decarceration’ was framed in the US prison crises of the 1970s
and 1980s which drove a new critical criminological agenda. Activism call-
ing for the abolition or radical reform of carceral institutions of many kinds
energised criminal justice and social policy debates. In his classic study
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2020 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League
and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which per-
mits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The Howard Journal Vol59 No 3. September 2020
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 261–285
analysing the closure of US asylums, Scull (1977) defined decarceration as
‘the state-sponsored effort to de-institutionalise deviant populations’ (p.3;
see also Scull 1984). He saw decarceration as being primarily driven by the
periodic fiscal crises of capitalism: when institutions became too costly, the
State sought to reduce their size and scope. In so doing, however,the State
passed on its duty to provide for vulnerable inmates to others, namely to
the private sector and poorly-resourced community organisations.
Scull’s view of decarceration, however, was double-edged. On the one
hand, he wanted to encourage it, on the other, he was highly critical of
its effects, as were others (Matthews 1987). This dichotomy characterised
other well-known work in this field which also tended to focus more on
highlighting the perverse consequences of decarceration than on suggest-
ing how these might be mitigated. Cohen (1979, 1985) famously argued
that community corrections were, above all, disturbing Foucauldian forms
of dispersed discipline. They were a means by which the State widened its
coercive net and thinned its mesh. Hudson (1984) agreed that deinstitu-
tionalisation involved the ‘shift of custodial techniques from the institution
to the community’ (p.50). By this logic, decarceration became a dead-end
argument – a process with an end point viewed as unattainable and often
undesirable (Hudson 1987). The decarceration debate was swept up in a
morass of ‘Nothing Works’ debates, and its energies were dissipated. In
the 21st Century, however, decarceration debates have gained a new mo-
mentum and a new urgency, prompted, in part, by the rise of mass incar-
ceration in the US (Cox, A.L. 2018; Davis and Rodriguez 2000; Goodman
and Dawe 2015; Gottschalk 2015; Platt 2006).1The UK also witnessed a
reinvigoration of debates around the uses and abuses of imprisonment at
the same time (Goldson 2005; Howard League 2014; Moore, Scraton and
Wahidrin 2017), not least because England and Wales have the highest im-
prisonment rates in Western Europe, with 154 prisoners for every 100,000
people in Wales,and 138 in England (Rees 2019). This article seeks to bring
a much-needed historical dimension to those debates.
Understanding past and present dynamics of decarceration matters be-
cause there is a quiet revolution currently underway in the British youth
justice system. The numbers of young people committed to some form of
custody has declined from over 7,000 in the late 1970s, to 2,800 in 2000, to
1,250 in 2013, to under 1,000 in 2016 (Cunneen, Goldson and Rusell 2018;
Godfrey et al. 2017, p.191; Goldson 2015; Youth Justice Board and Min-
istry of Justice 2016). The average monthly population in youth custody in
2018 was just 894 (Youth Justice Board and Ministry of Justice 2018). In
revealing the extent of the decline, this article argues that youth decarcera-
tion can not only be achieved, but also achieved over a comparatively short
period of time. The article offers a historical overview of the factors shaping
early decarceral trends and of classic and more recent theories of decarcer-
ation, in order to offer a way of reimagining decarceration for our times. It
supports calls by magistrates, policymakers, criminal justice frontline work-
ers, and child rights advocates, in arguing that we should now call time
on youth custody in favour of more creative and therapeutically-oriented
alternatives.
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2020 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League
and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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