Abstract

Much of the political rhetoric that facilitated mass incarceration was predicated on the promise of reducing fear among the public. Yet, it remains unclear whether the large increases in imprisonment experienced in many areas made residents feel less afraid. We examine this issue by integrating geographic data on imprisonment with individual-level data on fear from the General Social Survey (GSS). We find that people from states and counties with greater “cumulative imprisonment” rates were no less afraid than their counterparts from areas that imprisoned many fewer people. These findings hold for the public overall and for non-Latino whites and members of the working and middle classes, who frequently were target audiences for political rhetoric linking mass incarceration era policies to fear reduction. Our study supports growing calls to decouple crime and criminal justice policy from politics and electoral cycles, and to develop evidence-based punishment approaches organized around transparent normative principles.

摘要

许多促进大规模监禁的政治言论都是基于减少公众恐惧的承诺。然而，目前尚不清楚许多地区监禁人数的大幅增加是否让居民感到不那么害怕。我们通过将关于监禁的地理数据与来自综合社会调查 (GSS) 的个人层面的恐惧数据相结合来研究这个问题。我们发现，来自“累积监禁”率较高的州和县的人并不比来自监禁人数少得多的地区的人更害怕。这些发现适用于整体公众和非拉丁裔白人以及工人阶级和中产阶级成员，他们经常是将大规模监禁时代的政策与减少恐惧联系起来的政治言论的目标受众。