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Wisconsin Sentencing in the Tough-on-Crime Era: How Judges Retained Power and Why Mass Incarceration Happened Anyway
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 Wisconsin―a state where judges have considerable discretion in sentencing―explores 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.
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.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published January 17, 2017
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November 29, 2018
Definitive yet compact and accessible history of prison expansion in Wisconsin by Marquette Law Prof Michael O'Hear. Lay, expert or something in-between, if you're interested in the history of "mass incarceration" in Wisconsin you'll want this book in your library.
Just a word or 2 in summary. Depending on your perspective, the idea of prison abolition was either inspirationally idealistic or lunacy on stilts. In any event it never had a chance of course, and that was well before Willie Horton. But just how did we go from that extreme to the reality on the ground: billion-dollar DOC budget; prisons dotting the landscape; prison population exploding by an order of magnitude in a mere 3 decades? I can't do justice to O'Hear's coverage of that trip and won't try, but will say this. The legal discipline has a pronounced tendency to reduce complex human interactions to taxonomic categories. When done right, it becomes illuminating shorthand; O'Hear has a real gift for sizing up and assigning trends to aptly-named categories that inform an understanding of those tendencies. He identifies 3 categories that operated, sometimes in sync, sometimes in opposition, to mass incarceration: populism (the electorate knows best whether to lock-'em up); managerialism (experts on the ground know best about how long in prison was long enough); judicialism (judges know best -- about most anything, just ask 'em and they'll tell you).
So now what? Anyone who follows O'Hear's excellent blog (http://www.lifesentencesblog.com/) will already know that he's going to pitch "decarceration." But he'd probably be the first to acknowledge that strong inertial forces will have to be overcome. I have my own doubts that they will.
As if to underscore that pessimistic assessment, O'Hear has now posted a short "article [that] carries forward the narrative begun in my book," https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c.... The impetus is Wisconsin's Evidence-Based Decision Making, which O'Hear characterizes this way: "EBDM should help to keep low-risk offenders out of prison and to channel other offenders into proven treatment programs that can break the cycle of recidivism and reimprisonment. Thus far, however, there has been little apparent impact on state imprisonment rates. Indeed, closely considered, EBDM does not necessarily seem antithetical to an indefinite perpetuation of mass incarceration." And he concludes: "Mass incarceration has become the new normal in Wisconsin, as it has across the United States. Unlike many other states, however, Wisconsin has failed to achieve any sort of bipartisan legislative consensus in favor of major reforms. To all appearances, the state’s political leaders are generally satisfied with the current sentencing system and the level of imprisonment that it generates. ... When it comes to Wisconsin’s imprisonment rate, the emergence of a new new normal seems unlikely any time soon." Easy to see this article becoming a new chapter if and when a revised edition of "Wisconsin Sentencing" is released.
Just a word or 2 in summary. Depending on your perspective, the idea of prison abolition was either inspirationally idealistic or lunacy on stilts. In any event it never had a chance of course, and that was well before Willie Horton. But just how did we go from that extreme to the reality on the ground: billion-dollar DOC budget; prisons dotting the landscape; prison population exploding by an order of magnitude in a mere 3 decades? I can't do justice to O'Hear's coverage of that trip and won't try, but will say this. The legal discipline has a pronounced tendency to reduce complex human interactions to taxonomic categories. When done right, it becomes illuminating shorthand; O'Hear has a real gift for sizing up and assigning trends to aptly-named categories that inform an understanding of those tendencies. He identifies 3 categories that operated, sometimes in sync, sometimes in opposition, to mass incarceration: populism (the electorate knows best whether to lock-'em up); managerialism (experts on the ground know best about how long in prison was long enough); judicialism (judges know best -- about most anything, just ask 'em and they'll tell you).
So now what? Anyone who follows O'Hear's excellent blog (http://www.lifesentencesblog.com/) will already know that he's going to pitch "decarceration." But he'd probably be the first to acknowledge that strong inertial forces will have to be overcome. I have my own doubts that they will.
As if to underscore that pessimistic assessment, O'Hear has now posted a short "article [that] carries forward the narrative begun in my book," https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c.... The impetus is Wisconsin's Evidence-Based Decision Making, which O'Hear characterizes this way: "EBDM should help to keep low-risk offenders out of prison and to channel other offenders into proven treatment programs that can break the cycle of recidivism and reimprisonment. Thus far, however, there has been little apparent impact on state imprisonment rates. Indeed, closely considered, EBDM does not necessarily seem antithetical to an indefinite perpetuation of mass incarceration." And he concludes: "Mass incarceration has become the new normal in Wisconsin, as it has across the United States. Unlike many other states, however, Wisconsin has failed to achieve any sort of bipartisan legislative consensus in favor of major reforms. To all appearances, the state’s political leaders are generally satisfied with the current sentencing system and the level of imprisonment that it generates. ... When it comes to Wisconsin’s imprisonment rate, the emergence of a new new normal seems unlikely any time soon." Easy to see this article becoming a new chapter if and when a revised edition of "Wisconsin Sentencing" is released.
Displaying 1 of 1 review