The growth of the penal system and high rates of incarceration did not occur by accident. As discussed in Chapter 3, they resulted from a series of policy decisions that were intended to increase the severity of sanctions. Less well understood are the underlying causes of this turn toward tougher sanctions.
This chapter examines the social, political, economic, and institutional forces that help explain why politicians, policy makers, and other public figures responded to changes in U.S. society in the decades after World War II by pursuing harsher practices, policies, and laws—and why they succeeded. Running through those explanations is a uniquely American combination of crime, race, and politics that shaped the adoption of more punitive criminal justice policies. The salient forces include social and political unrest following World War II, especially in the 1960s; a major electoral realignment as the Democratic Party divided over civil rights and other issues and as the Republican Party became competitive in the south for the first time since Reconstruction; a decades-long escalation in national crime rates beginning in 1961; and major transformations in urban economies that included the disappearance of many well-paid jobs for low-skilled workers. They also include distinctive features of American political institutions, including the election and partisan political appointment of judges and prosecutors, a winner-take-all two-party electoral system, and the use of ballot initiatives and referenda in some states to develop criminal justice policy. These conditions made the United States more vulnerable than other developed democracies to the politicization of criminal justice in a punitive direction.
