The mismeasure of punishment

Abstract

Over the past few decades, scholars of punishment and social control have increasingly lamented the punitive turn in criminal justice policy. The perpetually growing size of prison populations has typically been portrayed as the end result of (indeed evidence of) an increasingly punitive criminal justice response. Although many recognize that the size of prison populations ultimately depends upon both the flow into and out of prisons, the vast majority of empirical work has relied on imprisonment rates, based on one-day counts of prison populations, as the dependent variable indicative of increasing punitiveness in imprisonment. In this article, state-level variations in imprisonment rates and in the determinants of those rates — admissions and length of stay — are explored. The findings demonstrate that state punitiveness rankings shift substantially depending on the measure of punitiveness and that the use of imprisonment rates as the sole measure of punitiveness masks substantial state-level variations across the functional determinants of those rates. The empirical findings suggest that social scientists studying punitiveness theoretically or empirically should distinguish the propensity to imprison from penal intensity. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for theoretical and empirical work.