“Rural Mass Incarceration and the Politics of Punitiveness”

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Gregory Brazeal now available via SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

Criticisms of American mass incarceration have generally focused on urban areas, and especially large, racially segregated cities.  But after nearly two decades in which urban incarceration rates have fallen while rural rates have risen, rural Americans are now more likely to be incarcerated than urban Americans.  Because most rural areas in the United States are overwhelmingly white, the rise of rural incarceration rates creates a puzzle for race-focused explanations of American mass incarceration.  Why would overwhelmingly white areas “lock up their own” in such great numbers?

This article proposes an explanation for the ongoing rise of rural mass incarceration that draws on two strands of political science research.  First, Peter Enns’s analysis of the origins of American mass incarceration suggests that changes in incarceration rates have been largely driven by two interrelated factors: crime rates and punitive public attitudes toward crime.  Because rural crime rates have remained lower than urban crime rates, Enns’s model implies that rural incarceration rates are likely higher than urban incarceration rates today primarily because rural Americans have more punitive attitudes toward crime.

Survey evidence shows that, in fact, rural Americans do have more punitive criminal justice views than nonrural Americans.  A second strand of political science research suggests possible explanations.  Scholars of political psychology including Karen Stenner and Marc Hetherington have found that punitiveness, like intolerance, tends to vary based on differences in personality and changes in perceived threats.  Notably, rural Americans have a higher average score than nonrural Americans on a standard measure of “authoritarian” predisposition, which is associated with greater punitiveness under at least some conditions.

Understanding political support for mass incarceration as fundamentally the product of psychological processes tied to punitiveness and intolerance rather than ideological attitudes specifically about race does not mean ignoring the central role of race in the politics that created American mass incarceration.  To the contrary, the most politically powerful expression of intolerance throughout U.S. history has been racial intolerance, especially toward Black and Indigenous Americans.  But attending to the political psychology of punitiveness suggests that confronting racial injustices in the criminal legal system, while necessary, may not be sufficient to end mass incarceration.